


as in a mirror dimly

by emi_rose



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Parallel, Character Study, Ensemble Cast, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2019-06-19 21:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15519393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emi_rose/pseuds/emi_rose
Summary: "Few people who have lived have ever experienced such loneliness, such hopelessness."Lucretia brings her family home, and carries on.[A character study of Lucretia, showing her POV of canon events.]





	1. the things you do for love will come back to you one by one

**Author's Note:**

> A big, big thank you to everyone who read bits and pieces of this and has encouraged me to keep making sand. I hope you enjoy it, it's a joy to write. Please do leave a comment or kudos if you do!

Killian knocks loudly on the door to the Director’s office. Lucretia jolts and closes the top drawer of her desk on a crude wooden duck carving.

“Come in,” she calls, a cold rush of anxiety seeping down her back. She sits ramrod straight and holds her breath, hoping against hope that everything has gone according to plan.

“Hey, boss, you won’t believe this but --” Killian starts.

“Did all three of them come with you? Are they alright?” Lucretia can’t help but interrupt her right-hand woman, voice tight with worry.

“Yeah, they’re fine, just a little dizzy, um, anyways, it seems like they’d be good hires, after all, they did manage to retrieve the Gauntlet,” she continues.

“Get them inoculated and bring them in for the Test of Initiation.” Her eyes are glazed and her speech is stiff.

“You okay, boss?” Killian asks.

“Yes, it’s just such a shame about Phandalin,” Lucretia murmurs.

Killian nods soberly, then her face brightens. “Look on the bright side, that’ll never happen again, right?”

“That’s right,” she says, and Killian takes her cue to leave. Lucretia opens the top drawer to her desk and thumbs over the beak of the duck Magnus had made her more than a decade ago. She presses her thumb into the tip and it hurts just enough to ground her. She’d seen him since, of course, dropping in on his wedding and purchasing pieces from the Hammer and Tongs here and there, but that doesn’t count, not really. She puts on her long, heavy over-robe, its comforting weight resting on her shoulders.

Lucretia has built herself a receiving room, and she waits anxiously, nervous feet moving invisible under her robes. If everything goes according to plan, they won’t remember her, and there’s a small part of her that hopes she made a mistake, one that would alleviate the crushing loneliness she faces, alone on the dais. She steadies her hands on the warm white oak and holds her breath. The voices of her friends grow louder as they approach, and when she sees them - glib and none the worse for wear, she breathes a sad sigh of relief. There’s no flicker of recognition in their eyes. She doesn’t give them her name.

The joy of their reunion is sullied by the reminder of how much she changed them, a guilty smack in the face. She takes a deep breath and speaks to her expectant audience, for all they know, a tabula rasa.

“Welcome, the three of you, to the Bureau of Balance,” she says, pitching her voice low, an old trick she had learned to quell her anxiety around public speaking. The gravitas she channels successfully masks the heady mix of joy and worry that swirls in her mind. “It’s a pleasure to have you,” she continues, careful to keep her face calm. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about your performance from Killian. Before we go any further, I’m going to need you to hand over the gauntlet so we can destroy it promptly.” Her heart pounds in her throat but her voice does not waver.  

Everything she has worked for, everything that has consumed her in this lonely decade, everything she has hoped for, is finally coming to fruition.

“But it’s _our_ gauntlet,” Magnus says, thoughtfully petulant. Lucretia’s heart clenches, and she wonders for a split second if he remembers.

“You see, that’s the kind of business we’re in. You know, we kinda get stuff, then people pay us for it, so…” Merle trails off with a laugh.

“Oh, you will be paid. You will be paid very, very handsomely,” she cuts in, relieved, channeling every ounce of calm leadership she learned from the Abbess Auriana.

Taako crosses his arms, leaning _contrapposto_ in that way he always has. “That’s the kind of thing people say if by ‘paying us’, they’re gonna kill us.” Merle laughs, wheezing a little bit, and it’s the happiest sound Lucretia’s heard in such a long time, even if Taako _had_ just accused her of wanting to murder them for the gauntlet. And after all, he’s still funny, he’s still whip-smart and incisive as hell, and she’s grateful for it.

She suppresses a laugh, settling for a vaguely amused expression with only the barely perceptible flare to her nostrils giving her away. “No, that’s not how the Bureau operates. Give me a moment.” She’s not sure how this is going to go. Davenport - he’s had a string of good days lately, able to speak in two and three word sentences, even, and his regression is inevitable. She resolves internally to make him a mug of cocoa this evening, a small kindness that does nothing to mitigate the damage she’s about to do.

She claps her hands, calls for Davenport, and seals his fate. He emerges from her office, sumptuously dressed, carrying a tray with a coin purse on it. Lucretia bites the inside of her cheek, hands wrapped around her staff, waiting with bated breath for what, if anything he will be able to say.

“Right away!” Davenport says, enthusiastic, without a trace of the stoic, capable leader he once was. Lucretia’s relieved that he can say anything at all, even as a poor shadow of the man he used to be. Magnus takes the purse and none of the three of them pay their Captain any mind. Perhaps it’s better that way.

Magnus turns his attention to her. “Excuse me, madam, what is your name?” She had thought the worst of it was over. But she is resolute, and manages a clipped response. 

“That’s actually classified.”

“Then how should we address you?” he asks, and she wants to say, _call me Lucretia, call me Lucy,_ and she would give anything to hear Taako call her _Lucy-Lu_ again. But she isn’t their Lucretia anymore. She reminds herself that for the time being, for the greater good, she’s their boss, and she can’t get close to them.

“The Director is fine.” It’s not fine, but it’s temporary, she reminds herself.

“Uh, Director—“ Magnus says, and the words sound wrong from him.

“Or Madam Director is fine also.”

“Madam — Madam Director—“

Lucretia cringes inside at the farce of her being in charge, as if anyone could keep these three on a leash, let alone her.

“Lady Director!” Merle jumps in, and Lucretia stifles a laugh.

“Shut up—“ Magnus begins.

“Nope!” Lucretia says, fairly sure that she would drop dead on the spot if she had to endure months of them calling her Lady Director, which is somehow the only title worse than Madame.

“I’m happy to destroy the gauntlet. I would like to be present while it is destroyed, so I can confirm —“ Magnus says. Lucretia steadies herself and continues her charade as planned, trying to avoid thinking of the effort Lup put into making the gauntlet, her thoughtfulness and kindness and every attempt to make sure the artifact she created could not be used for evil, her last ditch effort to undo what she’d done, trying to think of nothing at all.

“Oh, yes, I imagine you would. It’ll be quite spectacular,” she says, smoothing over the qualms in her voice.

“And it makes him horny!” Taako says, and Lucretia can’t help but let laughter burst through her layers of defenses. She’s heard this joke a hundred thousand times and yet — hearing it again, her heart leaps knowing that she didn’t manage to erase his terrible, terrible sense of humor.

“Shh! That’s between me and my god!” Magnus can barely speak for the laughter, and just the sound of it warms Lucretia’s heart. She had promised herself that she would try to remain impartial, to treat her family as just the employees they had become, but in this moment, she can’t imagine how she could ever treat them as less than.

“He loves seeing things destroyed,” Taako says.

“A stiff wind makes him horny,” Merle says, still laughing.

“That is not true!” Magnus says, feigning indignance.

Merle collects himself and turns his attention to Lucretia. “Can we watch while you hurl it into the fires of Mount Doom?” The reference to a story they heard decades ago on a doomed world makes her heart jolt. He doesn’t look like he’s testing her, doesn’t show the tells she learned after dozens of games of chess. She wonders for just a moment if he still plays. She doesn’t know what she hopes for.

Lucretia gathers her thoughts and allows the rehearsed words to fall from her lips, smooth as ice. “If only it were so simple. It’s actually taken us quite some time to develop anything capable of destroying something quite so powerful.” She wills her voice not to shake, wills them to remain unknowing, searches their eyes for any hint of recognition. She finds none, only innocent curiosity, excitement, eagerness, anxiety.

“Well, listen - listen. I’m—I’m but a simple idiot wizard,” Taako says, and Lucretia’s heart shatters. It would be funny if it was years ago, if it was another of his many plots, if he was in on the joke, if he didn’t really believe it. “Could you tell us a little about—“

Lucretia is slower to respond than she’d like, but she is absolutely reeling. “No, don’t sell yourself short,” she says, aghast.

“No, he’s not. It’s pretty accurate,” Magnus says, she keeps reeling, wills herself to continue, wills herself to concentrate on what they’re saying.

“No, I appreciate it, but I’m comfortable with where I’m at. I’m just standing in my truth, here. Listen, could you tell us a little about your organization, before we just....hand it over? It’s really scary, and it makes ouchies.. When you touch it I mean — ouchies. “

Lucretia just gapes at him. If this was before, she would assume he’s running a grift with Lup or someone, trying to see how far he could push some ridiculous meme until she cracked. But here, she knows how carefully she has to tread.

“When you touch the organization —“ she struggles heroically to keep a straight face.

“Gauntlet. It’s — it ouchies.”

Lucretia stares skeptically. “I see...”

“Remember - remember Phandalin?” (How could she not? The last town they destroyed, even in death Lup still has regrets, how could she not remember?)

She hopes this is a joke, some kind of dream, anything. “You’re the three who conquered Magic Brian and claimed the gauntlet, yes? That was—“ the words choke in her throat. Taako is still grinning, shit-eating smile still the same as ever but with nothing behind it.

“Remember Phandalin?” He asks again, goading her.

“Yes—Yes, sadly I do remember Phandalin,” she says, trying to not take his bait, the bait she can’t be sure he’s setting.

“Lucky, that’s lucky for you. Treasure that memory.” He can’t possibly know how those words are a knife to her, how he could spit such venom and not know it. She swallows bile, and tries to muster irritation, personality of a leader deigning to discuss something, not a dear friend, martyr, betrayer.

“We know what’s happened to Phandalin. We’ve been tracking the three of you—“ she doesn’t finish her sentence, as badly as she wants to, she can’t reveal all, can’t inoculate them, can’t do anything but see her best laid plans through.

“No— it was burned. The gauntlet burned it.”

Lucretia tips her head back, trying to pinch the bridge of her nose in irritation, hiding the hot tears that threaten to well at the corners of her eyes.

“Madam Director,” Magnus says, and she reminds herself to answer to this title, “we’re more than we appear, we promise.” She suppresses a burst of insane laughter at the irony of it all. “Just answer his question. Tell us a little about the organization. Then we’ll do the gauntlet destroying, have some tea, a nice oolong.” It’s a relief for Lucretia to hear that he still drinks the same tea, wonders if he has a sense memory of the smoky, alluring oolong from Tesseralia, wonders if she still has some tucked away to remind her of better days. She snaps back to reality.

“You think just because I’m a woman who is in her...mid-fifties, that I enjoy drinking tea?” She stumbles over her age, still can’t decide if she’s a hundred and thirty or the fifty she looks or the thirty she should be.

“No, I love tea. That was for me, I don’t care if you have any.” Lucretia stares him down. He always used to care.

“Okay,” she says, and closes the conversation.

Merle cranes his neck toward her. “Did you get my Animal House joke earlier?”

She absolutely did get it, and absolutely refuses to let him have the satisfaction. She never has. She returns to her carefully wrought script.

“The Bureau of Balance has a singular purpose, and that is to collect and destroy certain— let’s call them weapons of mass destruction. I guess you could call us a spot of disarmament organization, who is tasked with making the world safer by destroying the things that threaten it, namely powerful artifacts like the gauntlet that you have in your possession right now.” She’s practiced this particular version of the speech dozens of times since she enlisted a friendly commerce gnome to enact this homecoming plan. It sounds a little rehearsed, a little flat, and she hopes that they don’t notice.

“Gotcha!” Magnus says, and flashes her a grin.

“Sounds good to me!”

“Yeah, seems pretty solid.”

Taako makes to throw her the gauntlet, and Lucretia makes to catch it reflexively, trained by decades of dipshits trying to catch her unawares. Her guards lean forward, though, and she lowers her hand. Taako does the same, meekly. She’s never seen him meek. One of the guards, Jeryl, a good guy, if a bit hardheaded, goes to retrieve the sphere she’s fashioned with a hefty dose of illusion magic and a clever transporter spell. An empty sphere sits in wait in its designated place in her _sanctum sanctorum_ , and she hopes that the real thing will go as smoothly as every practice run she’s held late at night while her employees sleep.

Jeryl pops open the glass window of the sphere. “Plop that bad boy right in there,” he says, putting on his worst accent to try and confound the new hires. It never works, but with them, it gets a laugh.

Taako puts the gauntlet in, and Lucretia breathes evenly, willing her heart to slow its hammering pace. Jeryl closes the sphere, unaware of its true power - she was absolutely sure to hire guards who had no magic knowledge or aptitude. He draws the curtain away from the window overlooking the elaborate “relic destruction chamber” she fashioned from smoke and mirrors, puts the sphere in, and exits. His part has been performed perfectly.

Lucretia stands and leans on her staff, taking comfort in its warmth and its whispered promise of protection. She walks to the window and motions the others over, hoping that everything goes off without a hitch. She taps the end of her staff on the glass and channels through its arcane focus, by this point, it’s as easy as breathing.

The actual transportation spell is relatively simple, but the illusion that wreaths it is breathtakingly complex. Lucretia spent weeks agonizing over every detail, poring over notes she took from Davenport’s lessons decades ago. The sphere lifts up and is stabbed through with bright beams of light, blinding pillars of brilliance that hurt to look at. She watches her friends, transfixed, and is struck again by how different they have become. They stare as the metal ball floats to the floor, Jeryl picks it up wearing heavy gloves, and wheels it back in to the dais room, grinning broadly.

“That’s a spicy meatball!” He yells, and Lucretia facepalms. The boys laugh, and it’s almost like home.

Jeryl opens the glass door to find an empty sphere. Lucretia smiles for the first time, delighted at her plan’s success, and at the prospect of having her family back together. She tries to avoid thinking about the reality - how she probably will never repair the irreparable damage she’s done.

“Okay, payment upon obliteration, I suppose,” she says, and motions for Davenport. He appears from his stool in the corner and hands them a tray laden with a sack of money, a poor representation of everything she wishes she could give them. She beams, bursting with pride and hope and a hunger to know everything that they’ve done and even who they’ve become. “That gauntlet you just destroyed is responsible for some of the worst atrocities our world has ever known. The three of you should be very, very proud of yourselves.”

Magnus turns serious. “Do you know anything about this umbrella?” The question has to be innocent, it has to be. He can’t know how it’s destroying her to see the spitting image of Lup’s staff, yet another reminder that she’s gone and never coming back. Lucretia is careful to keep her face blank, stoic, the picture of leadership. And yet, she stutters, staring at the umbrella as if it's a corpse. 

“Um, no, but, our artificer might. I can send you his way after —“ 

“Yeah, just give me his contact info,” Magnus says, and she can’t quite believe he’s joking, but he is.

“Yeah, I’ll— I’ll LinkedIn recommend you to him.” She pauses, clears her head, tries to find the thread she was following, slip into the script she had desperately rehearsed up until the moment they arrived. “Um, the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet, is a very special, extremely powerful magic item. It is a weapon that was created by a band of wizards and warlocks and other magic-users, who refused to limit themselves. They refused to rein in their - their experimentation, if you will, and that resulted in the creation of what we call the Grand Relics. There are seven of them in the world.” She wills herself to finish, to finish the explanation that she’s crafted to work. It has to work. 

“Six,” Magnus interjects. 

She whips her head around to look at him. “Now there are six, yes, that’s right. Um, I — this is the first —“ she struggles for a moment to get back on script, having expected the worst. “We’ve searched so long for these relics. Our entire organization’s sole purpose is to find these relics, and—“ as soon as she gets back on track, she’s derailed by Taako.

“Wait a minute. I need to clarify something. Just so I’m clear: your whole organization, that lives in a moon, so far the score is zero?” 

“One!” Merle pipes up.

“No, that was us. That was us,” Magnus says.

“Oh, yeah.”

“I couldn’t get out of a jizz cave without nearly dying, and we — we destroyed one.”

Lucretia rolls her eyes at the mention of the so called jizz cave. She makes a mental note to write that on the HR paperwork, see if Brad notices. He probably will, and he’ll probably have an apoplexy too, if she knows him. And yet: these are three of the most capable people she knows, and they think themselves incapable. And Taako — she tried to give him the world, and here he is: one of the worlds greatest wizards, incredibly talented in every way, introducing himself as a dunce. A decade ago, he wouldn’t have demeaned himself. A decade ago, he wouldn’t have struggled to destroy slimes. A decade ago, he wouldn’t have been missing so much of himself. The urge to explain all of this, inoculate them, end this madness, overwhelms her. She only barely stays her own hand.

“Two assertions,” she snaps. “First, don’t sell yourself short. I think the three of you are capable of a lot more —“

“No, we aren’t—“ Taako interrupts. 

“We can get out of whole tunnels of jizz caves!” Magnus says.

Lucretia laughs, despite herself. “Second, uh,” she takes a moment to compose herself. “How long do you think we’ve been in operation?” Everything they say reminds her that all of her solo efforts have been in vain. She’s tried and she’s failed and she cannot do this alone.

“Sounds like about a half an hour,” Merle says. The boys laugh and even the guards snicker behind their regalia. " You spend all your time on your moon base, and didn’t go looking for —" 

Lucretia’s heart stops. She floats weightless, a pendulum at its apex, ready to plunge into the deep, ready for the accusations and the vitriol and the rejection, ready for the other shoe to drop. 

She didn’t go looking for Lup, not as long as she’d wanted to. She knows. She remembers.

“I’ve been there. I know how this game is played.” Taako continues, looking blank behind the eyes, like his train of thought has been forcibly derailed by the baby voidfish’s static.

Lucretia finds her steel again and soldiers on. “We, the Bureau of Balance as you now know us —“ She pauses to collect herself, plays it off as a power move, as gravitas, as anything but her world shattering around her again and again with the constant reminder of her necessary betrayal. “We have only been in operation for a little less than a year, now. What we do was not possible until we discovered the voidfish.” Her heart aches for Magnus, who doesn’t know what — who — he’s missing. She wonders briefly if he carves ducks for a friend he can’t remember, if he has an affinity for the aquatic, if he would be upset at how she used Fisher. “See, the war and the calamity and turmoil that the three of you now remember was a direct result of these relics. When —“ she stops herself from saying ‘when Lup disappeared, when we unleashed the Light of Creation on this world, when we sentenced them to a different kind of unforgiving end, when I let you do this,’ and she continues with her carefully crafted speech. 

“When these items were crafted, and word about their power spread, every kingdom in the land, every political organization, every mercenary guild, every religious community founded their own attempts to claim them for their own. And that contest for these relics led to a war the likes of which our world had never seen, and we simply couldn’t do what we do now until that turmoil subsided. And the only way that we could force it to subside is to make everyone forget about the relics in the first place.” Her chest aches with the truth. Her tell-tale heart beats, traitorous and unforgiving. She was a desperate woman when she made them all forget. She still is.

“Well, seems pretty straightforward,” Magnus says. “Pretty textbook.”

Lucretia gapes. “It’s actually incredibly circuitous, and difficult to understand, but I’m hoping the three of you are on board.” It’s an understatement, but she supposes it’ll do.

“Taako, did you get that?” Merle asks, more nasty without the undercurrent of love that Lucretia expects to hear. 

“Oh yeah, every word,” Taako says, clearly not paying attention. Some things never change.

“Sounds like you’re offering us a gig,” Merle says hopefully.

Lucretia is glad that part of her message has gotten through at least. “I would be happy to hire the three of you as reclaim—“ She’s cut off by Magnus, intent.

“Do we get a license to kill?”

“You don’t,” Lucretia fires back.

“Ugh.”

She’s not expecting him to accept her word as law so quickly, and she stumbles. “We, well, I mean, you can — you don’t need one, is what I’m saying.”

“Oh, okay.”

“You can just sort of do it. We would be happy, actually, to hire the three of you on as reclaimers, uh,” Lucretia is interrupted again by Taako and Merle singing “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), terribly.

“Love that track. Love that track, on board," Taako drawls.

This is nothing new for her, being interrupted by terrible serenades courtesy of her crew mates, but it’s been so, so long, and she’s still taken aback. “Yes, um, you may in fact —“ she struggles to regain her footing.

“Sunshine on Leith, right? I had that on cassette, homie,” Taako says.

Lucretia knows full well the extent of his eclectic music collection, and wonders with a pang what happened to it. She can’t afford to lose focus now, not when she’s almost made it through this test, a meeting she’s dreaded and anticipated for years.

“Let me explain. Our organization is made up of three main roles. We have seekers who look out for intelligence, regarding, um, the seekers look out for any information that can aid in the finding of these relics, but they are forbidden from claiming them themselves. That is where you come in: the reclaimers. This is actually a very hard position for us to fill, because most of the time anybody who discovers one of the Grand Relics is unable to fight off the temptation to claim it for their own.” She cringes internally at her mental capitalization of the pretentious title. “Ah — the three of you have proven that you are capable of avoiding that temptation and so we would be happy to have you as part of that illustrious role.”

She waits with bated breath.

“I — just to be clear, I have proven that. I just put it in my backpack,” Taako says.

“Yeah, we keep him around ‘cause he’s our —“ Magnus pauses, looks blank for a moment, then slips back into the flow of his words. “He’s too stupid to give in to temptation.” He’s completely serious, and despite hearing it again and again, it still breaks Lucretia to hear him described as stupid. He’s anything but, even now.

“That brings us to the third role, which we call the Regulators. Um,” she chooses her words carefully. This is the part of the job she’s hated since the beginning, since the first betrayal, the first thrall. “Anybody who goes AWOL, if you will, anybody who uses information gathered about the relics for their own whims, anybody who uses a relic, even once, will be hunted down and properly dealt with by the Regulators.” She looks at them expectantly.

“Super cool. Which one of these is Killian?” Magnus asks, in a cadence he picked up from Taako specifically to drive everyone else crazy. 

Lucretia does her best to sound dispassionate. “Oh, Killian is actually one of our star Regulators. She was hunting down one of our wayward seekers, who you met also, ah, you know him, I believe, as the Black Spider, or Magic Brian.”

“We killed him,” Magnus says, ever helpful.

“Yes, that was — uh — that was very kind of you, thank you for doing that,” she says, trying to reconcile her memories of someone who would die a painful death to protect others with whoever this was.

“You are welcome!” He sounds far too cheerful. 

“I killed — I killed him!” Taako pipes up.

“It was a group effort!” Merle says.

Lucretia glares. "I will be happy to welcome the three of you on board with the Bureau of Balance as reclaimers." She looks into three blank pairs of eyes, blinking balefully. "Um, the only thing standing in the way is the test, if you wish to get your bracers." She didn't think this would be a particularly hard sell, but nothing she's said has been received the way she expected. _Nothing_ about bringing her family home has gone the way she expected. 

"Oh, is it like, written?" Magnus asks.

"Oh, well, I'll see you guys later," Taako says, a cornered look filling his eyes as he turns to leave. Magnus grabs his elbow.

"He doesn't test well," Merle says.

"We had a -- we had a good run." 

"Can we have a proctor for Taako? A procto?" Merle is snickering. Lucretia stares agape. She's not used to him being cruel like this.

"Because of -- because of Taako's special magic abilities, he gets to take it untimed," Magnus says.

Lucretia furrows her brow. "No, there's no - there's no written component." 

"Sweet," Magnus says, with a fist pump. 

They seem to be amenable to the concept of taking the test of initiation, and Lucretia continues. "All I need to know is, between the three of you, which one of you is the smartest? Which of you is the strongest? Which of you is the bravest?" She knows them deeply, has observed them at their best and their worst, and she is confident that they know. For all their goofing, Taako is a certified genius. Magnus is strong - physically, mentally - and Merle is the bravest person Lucretia has ever known, let alone the wisest. She remembers the first time she saw Taako do impossible magic, the Tesseralia Losers, the first parley and the last. 

"Um, I think that's Taako, all of the above," Magnus says, and Lucretia would believe him if she heard any kindness in his voice. There's only malice, less gentle than she's used to. They laugh at his expense. She can't bring herself to join in. 

She can't believe she changed them so deeply. 

"Listen --" Taako starts in, and she expects something that knocks her on her ass for almost a moment too long, and she falters.

"Each of you must claim one of these three titles, and I'll leave it to you to decide among yourselves." She hopes they choose correctly. 

"I think that, um --" Taako says, and Lucretia is still dumbstruck by how vapid he sounds. 

"You've got a lot of street smarts," Merle says, condescending. Defensive. 

"Yeah, that's, that's very kind, thanks. I'm not kidding myself, I think between -- Merle is sort of the smartest by default, right?" 

Lucretia's heart shatters. She tried so hard to give him the world, and she failed him. She thought she was through the worst of it, and she knows now the worst is yet to come. 

"Yeah, I would say -- So, I would say, Taako's the bravest, and I'm the strongest," Magnus says, oblivious to Lucretia's inner turmoil.

"I'm cool with that," Taako says, blasé.

"Unless you want to go for strength, and it's like strength of will and mind, and I'm brave? Either one of those is fine with me." Magnus is uncertain where he should be sure-footed, questioning where he would be confident. "So, quick question, Director?"

"Yes." 

"When you say strongest, do you mean, like, physically? Or like--" 

Lucretia cuts him off with a wave of her hand that she doesn't quite intend. She falls back on the comfort of the rules she laid out when she founded the Bureau. "I cannot tell you anymore. You're in the test now."

"You can, you just choose not to."

"Oh, you're so deep in the test, oh, goodness, you're knee deep in test town," she says, deadpanningwithout a second thought.

"Alright, I am smartest, my friend Taako is--" Merle says. 

"Well, listen to you," Lucretia snaps at hearing him call Taako his friend. 

"I'm the, um, I'm the bravest," Taako says unconvincingly.

"I'm the strongest!" Magnus says.

"Okay," Lucretia says, and taps her staff on the ground, channeling Sleep into all three of them. Seeing them crumpled on the ground makes her stomach churn, but she soothes herself with the knowledge that she is closer than she ever has been.


	2. gather in your loose ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lucretia does some damage control. the boys manage to not die before they get hired.

 

Lucretia considers for a long moment the possibility of re-assigning their roles. She knows them better than they themselves do, hobbled as they are, and she worries that they might fail, that she has flown too close to the sun, that they will have to start again with a schism. Today, she decides, she will let them choose. She taps her staff again, warm oak whispering in her subconscious about the danger she is inviting, and transports them to the training dome, outfitted for the test of initiation.

She ensures that everyone is in their proper places: Bureau employees watching from the gallery, initiates (she reminds herself, they are initiates, not her family, not anyone she cares about more than she would any new talent) in the training room, disturbingly lifelike animatronic ogres and robots set up by Lucas Miller, who gives her a thumbs up from the control deck. She takes a deep breath, releases the Sleep spell, and speaks through the intercom with as much gravitas as she can muster.

“Welcome to the test of initiation. The point of this test is to balance the combatants that will soon enter the arena where Taako is currently in repose. These foes are going to be far too strong for you to fight outright. You will need to work together to ensure that they defeat one another, as the consequences of allowing one too much power will be quite dire indeed.” She’s given this speech dozens of times, and the familiarity is enough to allow her mind to wander, to remember giving this same speech to Killian and Carey, to Boyland, to Johann and Avi, to Brian. She clears her mind and starts again. 

“Uh, Merle, you are strapped into a very special cannon, which you will use to keep these monsters at equal footing. Each of the different potions that the cannon is equipped with will affect these ogres in different ways. You have one that can heal, one that can hurt, one that can strengthen, and one that will draw the attention of the other two. You only have one of each of the different types of ammunition.” She pauses to give them a moment to digest the rules and the task set before them. Before they arrived, she was certain that they would breeze through. Now, she’s concerned that Lucas’s bio-bots or automatons might actually kill them, perish the thought. She’s written herself into a corner and has to see it through.

Lucretia turns her attention to Taako, still laying on the floor for the drama of the thing. She doubts his ability to go hand to hand with any of Lucas’s creations, friends or no. “Taako, you are going to be in the arena with the ogres. I’m, I would not recommend attempting to fight them. Certainly you could try. You are able to use any of your magical tools in this test, if you so choose.” He doesn’t seem to be getting the message, so she continues, scrabbling for the right words. “Uh, I would recommend not doing that, because they’re very big, very strong, as ogres typically are.” Lucas rolls his eyes at her and is summarily ignored. 

“Your test will be to retrieve three gemstones from various parts of these ogres’ person, and by doing so, you will grant Merle extra ammunition for the cannon, which will in turn help you pass this test. Each gem that you collect will grant one of each type of ammunition. If you draw their ire, though, you will almost certainly perish, as many before you have. We have a very high turnover rate, here at the Bureau of Balance.” She hopes this is enough to dissuade them. There’s a murmuring between the employees in the gallery.

“To aid you in this test, you have a single potion of invisibility if shit gets crazy.” She pauses for effect.

“Magnus, you have been designated the strongest,” the words feel wrong in her mouth, but she continues. “And in this test, you will use your strength to protect your allies. You stand in the center of the sky bridge, next to a button that if pressed, will emit a shock to both Merle and Taako, which will incapacitate them for a short time. If any enemies who will approach from either side of the skybridge press that button, your friends will be harmed and paralyzed temporarily.” She notices him staring longingly at the button and looks for a way to emphasize the stakes more. “Um, so, you will need to use your strength to protect that button at all costs.” 

Over her earpiece, Lucretia hears Merle mumble to himself, “we’re dead.” She hopes it’s a joke, and her concern increases exponentially upon seeing Magnus brush the button with his index finger, humming out of tune. 

“If the three of you understand the test fully, we can begin.” She stands by the window, hoping that her death grip on her staff is not immediately obvious, and that no one comments on the intensity with which she delivers her instructions. 

Taako laughs wryly. “Listen, you don’t have the spare hours I would need to understand this test fully.” Magnus laughs. Lucretia’s stomach aches. “Get some shiny things off the monsters. Dig.” Despite his vapidity, despite his dangerously low self esteem, she’s struck by how much he sounds like himself, and kindles a small spark of hope. 

They begin, and Lucretia has to force herself to focus on their performance. It’s hard for her to watch. Magnus dispatches a robot handily, and she shoots a glare at Lucas, who looks like he’s swallowed something nasty. Her heart leaps when Taako uses a mage hand to snag a gem, when they threaten him and he snaps back with “let them try!”. She is proud of him as long as she doesn’t remember who he used to be. 

Magnus destroys another handful of robots. Lucas decides, loudly, that he hates this new guy and his vendetta against robots. Taako frisks an ogre. Lucretia begins to gently beat her head on the wall. It’s not out of character, per se, but underneath her reflexive response is a genuine delight to see his shenanigans again. She presumes that this will fade into her usual annoyance with their bullshit. She hopes they’ll become annoying again. 

The growing audience gasps in delight when Taako casts a particularly powerful Magic Missile and yells “suck on this!”. Lucretia pretends to watch with interest but lets her mind fall blank, trying to be anywhere else. When he starts yelling about a “wang check”, she snaps back into focus and regrets it instantly. She returns to gently beating her head against the wall, wishing she’d fed anything and everything about genitals to the baby voidfish. 

When Magnus tears the arms off of one of Lucas’s robots, Lucretia hears an offended gasp from where Lucas is standing, looking increasingly tense. She hopes he learns to let it go — and that he’ll make her more robots. She watches intently as Lup’s umbrella shakes violently in Taako’s bag and can’t tear her eyes away as he pulls it out and fires a silver bolt to end the test. She supposes that the magic Lup left in it somehow knows to protect him, one last gift she didn’t know she was giving, a decade after the fact. Now is not the time to consider that they have settled somewhere with an incomplete quorum, nor is it the time to consider that Lup is gone forever, nor is it the time to consider whether or not “dead” is the correct terminology. 

She taps the intercom and attempts to summon some kind of calm for herself. “That was quite an unconventional way of, uh, of doing that, I particularly liked when you ripped the arms off that poor helpless robot.” Lucas glares daggers at her. “But, congratulations! You have passed the Test of Initiation.” She flips the intercom off and glides out without another word. 

* * *

 

Lucretia sits in her office, head in her hands, and waits for the door to her throne room to open, for her summons from a guard. She appreciates the literary irony of literally placing herself on a pedestal, especially before her family, and a part of her cringes. Through the door, she hears enthusiastic cheers from the Bureau staff, clattering that sounds suspiciously robotic in origin, a cry of “I can’t believe you ripped that robot’s arms off! That was sick!”. She puts on her heavy formal robe and pushes through the door before she can be summoned, far from eager to put on a show. 

On entering her throne room, Lucretia sees Magnus holding the arms he ripped off of Lucas’s automaton. She makes a mental note to keep them as far away from each other as possible. Lucas can work in his lab and stay far away from Magnus’s newfound anti-robot sensibilities. As she sits atop the dais, the three prodigals approach. Out of an uncomfortable combination of anxiety and desire to stay perched behind a façade, Lucretia golf claps. She tries not to remember the untold number of times they all sat around in the kitchen or on the deck, mocking stiff bureaucrats or small time politicians on this world or that for doing exactly what she is doing now.

“We’re all very, very impressed. You all — uh — we’ve—“ she searches for words that will be honest but not suspicious, and settles on the most trite sentiments she can think of. “We’ve seen a lot of different solutions to the test of initiation, but nothing quite so colorful as that. So, uh, congratulations are in order. The three of you are now, ah, fully fledged members of our order." She fumbles her words, and hopes that they're high enough on adrenaline and victory to not question why someone so full of gravitas and possessed of all her faculties would be reduced to a mumbling idiot in front of three new, green recruits. "We're happy to have you on as reclaimers, uh, and we are pleased to present you each with your tailor-made bracers of balance, is what we call them." She pauses, hoping they pick up on the wordplay. Three blank faces stare back at her. "We're really into alliteration here," she says, warmly exasperated.  

She claps and calls for Davenport, almost without thinking, like she has done for every new recruit she's hired since the beginning. When she sees him enter with the tray of bracers, her heart lurches. She regards him closely, dissecting his every micro-expression for a hint of recognition. When he announces himself delightedly, she hears the joy in his voice without a trace of recognition. She waits for him to say something more. 

Lucretia remembers her desperate, futile attempts to make him say something, anything else. 

_ I'm Lucretia and you're Davenport. _

_ Davenport! _

_ Yes, you're Davenport. I'm Lucretia. _

_ Davenport? _

She breaks down in tears, his name echoing, taunting her every time he speaks.

She snaps back into the present and stares for a moment at her captain - her ward, she reminds herself, scathingly - trying to put her own words together, comes up with a joke that dates back to their college days. She stares them down with one pointedly arched eyebrow. "Make sure that you put on the right one, because once they go on, they never come off."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Merle backpedals. 

Lucretia plows ahead. "You wanna make sure and put on the one that was tailor made for you, or else there will be some...ah...permanent discomfort." She cocks her head expectantly. 

Taako looks up at her, hiding anxiety behind rolled eyes and a shit-eating grin. "I'm concerned about bracer stink," he snickers, drawing out the phrase. "What's the policy on that? Do you have a certain sort of detergent?" 

_Challenge accepted_ , Lucretia thinks, and follows him down this rabbit hole, playing along, waiting for one of them to break first. It's nostalgic. "Each initiate in the order, the Bureau of Balance, is also granted a special brush, and you can just sort of get it in there and do some grouting." Everyone in attendance is in stitches, except deadpan Lucretia. She continues, only the barest hint of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. "For your arm stink." She pauses for dramatic effect. "There's going to be a smell, I'm not going to lie to you; each of our initiates does have to deal with a smell, but you get used to it, and certain people, I've learned, actually kind of come to like it." She's struggling to stay straight-faced now, and tries to arrange her face into a benign, tight-lipped smile, not the wicked grin she would wear when trying to fuck with the twins. 

"Does -- does the wrist ever turn green underneath the bracer?" Merle asks earnestly, uncharacteristically meekly, raising his hand.

Lucretia's eyebrows shoot up. "If it does, you'll never know. So you have that going, I suppose." She gestures to Davenport, who hands each of them the appropriate bracer. "Oh, put those on your left wrist, by the way. Actually," she stops herself. She can't remember who's left handed or right handed or ambidextrous, she reaches back back back in her memory and comes up blank. Usually she's the one writing, turning their chicken scratch into something legible for a posterity that may never arrive. She has a job to do now, though, and she can flagellate herself for forgetting details later. "What - what dominant hand are you?"

"I'm ambidextrous!" Magnus volunteers proudly.

"Of course you are," Lucretia says. She tries to put more sarcastic bite behind it, but it comes out softer than she intended. He's not ambidextrous, of course, just thinks he is, but she's always humored him. She sees no reason to stop now.

"Uh, I prefer right," Taako says, already putting the bracer on his left hand. Lucretia tries to continue.

"'Kay, just make sure you don't put it - it's easier, we find, to have it on your non-dominant hand, but I suppose it's up to you," she says, weary from the façade. They obey, and the bracers seal themselves. She's brought them home, and the idea of having another chance fills her with renewal. Buoyed, she rushes through the last part of her prepared speech.

"Welcome to the club. This is very exciting," she catches herself before she continues to have you home again, to see you again, to have another chance. "We have not had, ah, new reclaimers in the order for quite some time." She flashes a brilliant smile. There is no recognition in their eyes. For a moment she wishes there were.

"Well, it's no wonder," Merle says.

"Why is that?"

"Well, it's a tough process gettin' in." 

Lucretia grins. "Yeah. Yeah. it's--"

"Yeah, totes is," Magnus says, laughing. 

"It's not a very high completion rate, for the test, but the three of you don't have to worry about that ever again." Her heart aches and she pushes the unbidden wave of memories away. "You've already been paid handsomely your finder's fee for finding the gauntlet, and you will be paid as such each time you can find a grand relic," she pauses, skitters over the name she's given them, "for one of us," she finishes lamely. She presses on, trying to find her momentum again. "There are six left." And six of us, she thinks. She wrenches herself back on-script. "Your job duties will include following up on any promising information that our seekers and spies find for us. We will send you out on missions, and you will do what you did in Phandalin, ideally without involving the destruction of an entire city and also thousands of souls." Something about being around them again, the part that makes her heart sing, makes her prone to insensitive cracks. She grimaces.

"Well, I mean, ideally, yeah, but like, stuff," Magnus says, ever helpful. Lucretia stares at him, mentally agape.

"It's collateral damage," Merle adds. Lucretia stiffens.

"Will that come out of our paycheck, or what's the story there?" Taako asks. Implications about his character aside, this is a question she can actually answer.

"Oh, no, no, if it did, you all would actually owe us a hefty sum of money."

"Well, what was our paycheck, by the way? Just...curious," Merle says. 

"Six hundred large." She looks through them, can't focus the way she wants to. "Now, I understand, we are certainly sympathetic to the fact that not everybody who joins the Bureau is interested in monetary gain." They're all laughing, and her usual explanations for why these three would be laughing like this fall flat. It's another reminder of the fact that these are not the men she grew up with, traveled with, changed with. They're different people, now, and she cannot afford to forget that.  "It sounds by your guffawing that you are not counted among them. A lot of people who come to join the Bureau are interested in the acquisition of power, as well." 

"Yeah!" Taako says. Lucretia raises an eyebrow, trying to appear arch rather than surprised. The concept of Taako seeking power when he's easily the most powerful transmutation wizard in any plane is laughable to her. 

"Uh, and that is something that we are actually very well-equipped to help you out with." 

"At this point, I've learned that money's a sucker's game. There's nowhere to use it, ever," Taako says.

"We actually have, um," Lucretia pauses to try to sum up Fantasy Costco in non-horrifying terms, and fumbles. "we have, uh,"

"I just want a dog," Magnus says, surprising no one.

"No dogs are allowed on the moon, unfortunately," Lucretia says.

"What?!"

"Yeah, it's, see, here's the problem: they just run right off the goddamn thing," she says drily. She doesn't know why she expects him to get the joke; she remembers her hand frozen over the page, deciding whether or not to keep Magnus's history of trying to smuggle dogs aboard -- and the ensuing Dog Incident -- or redact it. She chose the latter.

"Aw, I'd keep him on a leash, and I'd feed him, and I'd walk him every day, and I'd make sure he didn't commit suicide off the moon!" He's so painfully sincere, and for her part, Lucretia is glad that hasn't changed. She shakes her head and gets back on track.

"We've actually permitted an independent retailer space on our campus. If you want, you can actually spend some of your, uh, hard-earned money at the Fantasy Costco and purchase --"

"It's called Fantasy Costco?!?" Taako interrupts, aghast. His tone is so different that it makes Lucretia wonder, heart in her throat, if she made a mistake, if there's something she let slip through, but there's still no flash of recognition in his face, so she continues as if there's nothing wrong.

"That is the name of the establishment, yes. I didn't name it, of course, I named the Bureau of Balance which I thought was a terrific name, much, much better than Fantasy Costco, but--" 

"Davenport came up with that, right?" Merle asks. Lucretia freezes. Davenport's history of shitty naming decisions was such a common topic of discussion at the dinner table that first cycle. Even before they left, they gently, disbelievingly mocked his naming abilities, and this is so deeply in the same vein. She's not sure how much more of this she can take. She swallows the lump in her throat.

"Uh, no. He does not run the Fantasy Costco," she looks at him, inscrutable apologia deep in her eyes, "he's my charge, my ward. Isn't that right, Davenport?" She can't parse what's happening in his mind, certainly can't see through to the quickly-dismantling labyrinthine paths through the fog that he's fought to craft over a decade. 

"Davenport!" he says, proudly with a tinge of frustration. Lucretia soldiers on. They're affording him some respect but she hears their whispers of "Davenport!" and "he's a Pokemon," and it's everything she's feared.

"But in addition to monetary rewards, we do have a system in place for allotting each of you a certain measure of power. Now, of course, the strictures of our order prohibit us from granting each other magic items." She's back on firmer ground, now, answering the same questions every new recruit asks, and she's proud of the strictures and checks and balances she's crafted and refined over the decade. She's had a lot of time to work on them over sleepless nights, pushing her memories to the side with semantics.

"Cool," Magnus says.

"Obviously, lesser magic items we will permit you to keep. I notice you have some Loafers of Leaping there. We will not take those from you because we find it's a necessary evil for you to do your job, to have--"

"My loafers are not evil!" Magnus says indignantly. It's such a Magnus response, that Lucretia can pretend for a moment, that this is his homecoming and they are whole and seven again.

"It's certainly not, compared to the gauntlet you just destroyed, uh, those leapers --" she stumbles over the lie she's not used to telling, "those leapin' loafers are not going to destroy an entire city, certainly. However, our order's not allowed to --" she wrenches herself back on-script, back into the role she is playing here, "does not permit us to give each other magic items, but we do have a clever workaround for that. Davenport will now pay you your final reward, your finder's fee."

"He's going to kill us!" Magnus says. She knows the response without thinking, to a joke they've made since before they left.

"He's going to murder the three of you," she deadpans. They laugh, and it's almost real. "Thank you for your service, goodbye," she says.

"Is this like, a signing bonus?" Merle asks. Lucretia reminds herself that this is the first time they've heard or made this joke. She forces a serious image. 

"Yes, that is a terrific way of thinking about it. This is your signing bonus." She gestures to Davenport, who steps forward and proudly presents them with Gachapon tokens. "If you present them to our resident artificer, he will help you out with acquiring a few new tools you can use on your adventures. You're going to want to leave this dome, head to the third dome on your right, and then inside that dome is a smaller dome. Goddamnit, we do love domes around here." They laugh, and it's almost as if they remember her joy and fascination with every new style of architecture, teasing her for how much she loved domes. She designed everything here herself. She hopes they're proud, somewhere deep inside where they can't remember.  "Inside, you'll find the artificer's chambers. Do you have any questions about your new job, your duties, anything along those lines?" She is so close to releasing the tension that's been building since they bumbled their way into her receiving hall. 

"What happens with the bracers after we've found all seven objects?" Magnus asks, and Lucretia assumes he's fucking with her, as he always would.

"Oh, shit," she deadpans. 

"Maybe that's our reward for finding all the objects," Merle says, dead serious.

"Yes, it's that we very quickly cut your hand off and get the bracer off, but then we attach the hand back, and it's like, not a big deal." She struggles to keep the internal eye roll out of her voice. 

"Sounds cool to me!" Magnus says, shit-eating grin plastered on. She allows herself to grin back, and another time, it would have been a new inside joke, a new moment of camaraderie. 

"Excuse me, I have a question," Taako says.

"Yes, yes?" Lucretia responds, wary. 

"Was the seventh object love the whole time?" He can barely speak through the giggles. Lucretia, holding said seventh object, is unmoved. "Because I'd like to know that upfront. I can't run around for however long and at the end find out that the seventh thing was love. So, I'm gonna ask upfront if it's love." 

She shifts her grip on the staff. "I cannot --" she fumbles for the right words to make the joke land and avoid arousing suspicion. It's a fine line to walk. "We don't have enough, it would be irresponsible for me to confirm or deny that right now, we don't have enough intel to confirm --"

"I knew it! Heads up guys! The seventh object is love!" Taako crows. 

Lucretia stays as perfectly stoic as she can. "We can't confirm or deny if the magic was inside you all along," she says.

This Taako, this half-person she's responsible for, has far less tact than she's used to. Where she expects a joke to end, it continues, flogging a long-dead horse until it's not even possible for it to be funny anymore. "It was inside us the whole time, guys. That's the thing." 

What's even more odd to Lucretia is that Magnus joins in, flogging away. "Okay, just blink twice if the seventh object is love." She stares at them, eyes wide open. 

"What I'm saying is, once we get six, let's head back here and chill," Taako concludes, steps back and crosses his arms. He can't possibly know that there were only ever six for them to find, and she searches his face for any hint of duplicity. She finds nothing. "No, I guarantee it's love. She won't even say it's not love, it's totally love. Just think and remember, okay?" Lucretia's an author who is well read across a hundred planes of existence, and were she not experiencing it at this very moment, she would consider this dramatic irony unrealistic and heavy-handed. She's more than a little dumbstruck.

"Yeah, okay," she says, trying to close down this particular path of inquiry. 

"We get to keep the other ones, but it's love," Taako insists.

"Perfect," she says, without really hearing a word he's saying.

"Will we have a way to identify the objects, or do we just have to keep bringing magical shit we find and say, 'is this one of them? Is this it?'" Magnus asks, laughing.

"Whatever magical detritus hones into our vision we'll bring to you like stray dogs," Taako adds, suitably derailed from his previous joke. 

"I found a rock that's kind of warm when it should be cold! Is that one?" Magnus asks.

Lucretia is dumbstruck. He's given her a fairly good description of the Philosopher's Stone as it would appear, though, minus the thrall. Her mind races through things to say. She settles on following the joke. "Yeah, you nailed it. Hand that bad boy over," she says drily. 

"Or it's charcoal!" Merle says. Everyone laughs. Lucretia pastes a thin smile on her lips. 

"Uh, any other non-terrible questions?" As if she'd expected anything else from these three. As if she hasn't deeply, deeply missed all their bullshit and shenanigans. 

"Is there a health plan?" Merle asks. 

"Just don't die," Lucretia says. After all, Merle is the health plan. She knows how competent he is, how deeply caring. She can't imagine he would have lost that too.

"I actually do have a question," Magnus says, and Lucretia has to brace herself.

"Hit me."

"Out on the world, are there agents that we should be on the lookout for? Like, is there a way to identify one another aside from the bracer?"

She thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous, and yet. "I mean, you have a pretty big silver bracer on that will typically...help you out. If you're ever sent on a mission where you need to correspond with another member of the Bureau, we will certainly let you know ahead of time to keep an eye out. We value teamwork here." She sounds like someone from HR, but if she's being honest with herself -- it's better than sounding like the Lucretia she used to be. 

"And does the bracer do anything other than summon the glass ball balloon thing?"

Lucretia shouldn't be surprised that the man who named his relic the "Time Cup" would call her transporters "the glass ball balloon thing". "Oh, it does allow us to know exactly where you are at all times."

"How do we get around? What kind of transportation do you provide?" Merle asks. Lucretia has been afraid of this question. Even though she knows them better than she knows herself, no one is immediately on board with their unorthodox transportation system. She doubts they'll be any different. 

"We -- uh, we," she looks for a way to explain 'firing you in the general direction of your mission out of a cannon' without making them turn tail. 

"Do you pay for gas?" he tries.

"There -- well, no,"

"Yeah, is there mileage reimbursement?" Magnus asks. Lucretia gestures to them to be quiet so she has half a hope of explaining the cannon system before they all die of old age, elves included.

"Mostly we just, ah, again, this is going to sound much more unpleasant than it actually is, we fire you out of a cannon."

"Cool," Magnus says. Lucretia looks at them agog. 

"You're going to love it. It's a very efficient form of travel that skips over a lot of boring narrative of, you know, walking through a goddamn forest for two days or something." Even now, she's ever the storyteller, ever the writer tasked with crafting narratives of world after world. Travel time never used to be a problem and she'd been spoiled enough to find a suitable substitute.

"So, my question is this," Taako begins, more ostentatious than Lucretia's used to. "As far as you know, is there another, like, is there a bad Bureau of Balance? Like, a bad guy?"

"A Bureau of Imbalance?" Magnus adds helpfully. Taako echoes him. 

Lucretia resists the urge to smack herself in the forehead. She chooses her words carefully, following the script she'd set out for this particular contingency. She'd planned for every contingency, and this is just a part of this plan, she reminds herself. She takes a deep breath and starts in, hoping they don't ask too many ridiculous questions that verge on the truth. "As far as we know, the rogue wizards (and fighter, and cleric, and whatever the fuck Barry counts as) who called themselves Red Robes (who I named yesterday in a late-night bout of writer's block) -- as far as we know, the rogue wizards who created all of these...weapons of mass destruction, they're all gone (except for the three of you, and me, and Davenport)." This is where things get sticky, where technicalities and half-truths smear into outright lies and deception. She smooths invisible folds out of her robes. "They-- they have all, most of them were killed in the mad hunt for these objects." She muddles through, deciding midway through her sentence that an outright lie would be permissible. Though, if she wants to be technical, their old selves are dead, staticked away, and Lucretia reminds herself of this. "As far as we know, we have not seen any Red Robes." This, this is as outlandish a lie as it gets, unless she mentally takes away the capital letters. Even then, she's guilty of poring over her memorabilia, running her hands over soft red fabric, worn with age and secreted away. "If you notice any on your journey--" 

"If we see someone in a red robe, kill 'em. Got it," Magnus says.

Secretly, Lucretia wants to smack him, tell him exactly why trying to kill Barry would be a terrible idea,  but she can't give up on her plan that easily, especially not for something so base as sentiment. She has to take a moment to collect her thoughts and avoid being rash, even though the thought of them fighting to the death like that gives her chills that sink deep into her spine. "No, don't," she says sternly, and it's the best she can think to say. As their boss, she's entitled to give them orders, even if they're as basic as "don't try to take on your lich family especially when you don't remember who they are". She reminds herself that she has a contingency plan for if - somehow - they run into Lup or Barry, reminds herself of the six magically sealed cells in the depths of the moon base that not even she could escape from. She speaks with every ounce of gravitas she can muster. "It's imperative that you bring them to us, that you allow us to detain them, because the information they hold may be...invaluable." 

She hopes she doesn't have to imprison them. She fully expects she will.

"What if it's just a regular person wearing a red robe?" Magnus asks, grin bouncing back onto his face after a quickly-abandoned attempt to be serious. 

Lucretia suppresses a snicker. "Well, I guess, just be careful and use your best judgment. I guess." She makes a mental note to make sure all of the appropriate connections are in place to bail the three of them out of jail. 

"Got it!" Magnus says. Lucretia calculates an 83% chance that he does not in fact, 'got it', and will murder some poor person making an ostentatious fashion choice. 

"Like Hugh Hefner?" Merle asks. 

"Why would he be--" Lucretia starts to ask, then just as quickly gives up on convincing him that no, Fantasy Playboy is not run by an evil rogue wizard. 

"Or like Little Red Riding Robe?" Magnus tries. 

Lucretia expects a witty comment from Taako to come blow them both out of the water, but he's just standing there, studying his cuticles intently. She pinches the bridge of her nose. "Yep. Yeah. Little Red Riding Robe." 

The three of them walk away without saying goodbye -- some things haven't changed, Lucretia supposes. She forces herself to keep up the stately image she worked so hard to cultivate as she dismisses the stragglers and the guards with a wave of her hand, then exits through the side door to her office. Davenport follows immediately behind her. 

As soon as the door closes behind her, Lucretia's poise dissolves. She slumps over her desk and lets out the shaking breath she's been holding in. Davenport appears at her shoulder, questioning look on his face. 

"Davenport?" he asks, too loud and sharp. 

"Not now, Davenport! Just, just go away,"  she snaps. He leaves without another word. Lucretia immediately feels ashamed, treating him like he doesn't know better. As if she wasn't burdened with enough guilt, he's lost more words, now, and she can't undo the damage without making everything worse. She knows fully that there's no way out but through. She calls on the steel that saw her through a lonely year, that got her out of Wonderland alive, and vows to see this cycle through.

Later that evening, Lucretia finds herself in her secret office, baby voidfish waving eager tentacles at her, playfully seeking her attention. She resists the urge to open the lavender-scented chest where she rests her back, and resists the urge to see how her new Reclaimers (not her brothers, no, her new employees) are settling in. She buries her face in soft red fabric and waits for sunrise.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Elaine and Tara for betaing! Updates will post on Wednesdays and Sundays. Find me on tumblr at @emi--rose! Thank you very much for reading, leaving kudos, and commenting!


	3. peeking through the fisheye lens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the oculus resurfaces. leeman kessler meets (meats?) his unfortunate end. tom bodett senses impending doom.

Lucretia has procrastinated for three uncharacteristic days, choosing to bury herself in paperwork and hide from everyone who wasn't Davenport or Killian or, unfortunately, Brad. The latter's cheerful, positive disposition every time he came to deliver reams of work made her feel the acute need to wander to the dojo and punch robots for a few hours. 

Thursday morning, five minutes past acceptable bother-the-boss o'clock,  Killian sticks her head in Lucretia's office. "Director?" 

Lucretia snaps her head up from her desk and tempers the urge to snap at Killian for scaring her. "Yes, Killian?" she says, unnaturally calm. Killian's eyes widen, aware of the mood her tone portends. 

Killian slips sideways through the door, loath to open it completely. "Good morning, boss, hope I'm not intruding on anything important, but have you, uh, scheduled the new Reclaimer briefing yet? I've been trying to do some FAQs with them but it would be easier if you just got them through as quickly as possible, okay, gotta go, bye!" She disappears as fast as she arrived. Lucretia pinches the bridge of her nose. 

The solution is ingenious, and Lucretia kicks herself for not having come up with it before. She pulls out a fresh sheet of parchment and begins carefully drafting a memo, one that Davenport can drop off without her having to answer too many questions that veer close to the truth. The details she chooses to tell them are deliberate: the schools of magic, some of the damage the relics did during the war. She does not give their names or powers, and doesn't quite understand why. 

That evening, she blocks off the training icosahedron and turns the training robots to their most difficult setting. Punching a Lucas Miller original creation usually does wonders for her mood, but despite the satisfying ache in her muscles and the sweat pouring off her brow and between her shoulder blades, she feels restless, like something's out of place, something she can't fix by punching even more robots. She grits her teeth and returns to work.

Of  _course_  it's the Oculus, Lucretia thinks to herself, stone faced in a meeting with two of her Seekers. It's the one she'd never  _really_  seen in action, the one whose powers she can only guess at. She doesn't have a choice, though, and so she begins to calculate. She can try to send someone with no power to resist the thrall and hope they don't come into contact with the relic long enough to fall under its spell, or she can send these shadows of her former crewmates. 

Lucretia expects that Leeman Kessler will fall victim to the Oculus and that she is sending him to his death. She's only half correct. When the news reaches her at an ungodly late hour, she decides that it doesn't particularly matter how he died, just that he will need to be forgotten and that she will have to take a chance with her new Reclaimers. She refuses to use their first names when she pages them to the briefing room, and for a moment, she lets herself forget who they used to be.

Lucretia calls for her Reclaimers, her  _employees_ , as she is careful to remind herself, when it's clear that Leeman Kessler has met his untimely fate attempting to retrieve the Oculus. She waits in the briefing room, sparely appointed, wearing her outer robe over silk pajamas. She wasn't sleeping, not exactly, but she had hoped to get some rest. Sleep has been hard to come by for her in the past three weeks, ever since she set the clock ticking down towards the apocalypse yet again. She searches for something in here to occupy the time it takes them to, presumably, get dressed and find the briefing room. She decides on reviewing a map of Lup's potential whereabouts, one last glassing marked down on the map of Faerun that she sees whenever she closes her eyes. When a guard comes in to hand her Kessler's personnel file, she sighs and begins to review it for anything she must avoid redacting. 

Erasing lives has become routine to her, now. Only part of her hopes it gets easier. 

When the three reclaimers enter, Lucretia does a double take. She shouldn't be surprised to see them come to a briefing in footie pajamas and puppy boxer shorts and whatever the  _fuck_ Merle is wearing, but it's been long enough that she can't quite believe her eyes. She puts the parchment down and smacks her forehead. 

"What... what are you wearing? What is --  _What are you wearing?_ " she asks, frustrated and grieving and already done with their shit, uncharitable as that may be.

"What are  _you_  wearing?" Magnus fires back. Lucretia shifts in her seat to make sure her pajamas don't show through the thick cloth of her outer robe. 

"I - I'm wearing my full business regalia," she tries, archly. 

"Cool," Magnus says, apparently satisfied. 

"You got ink underneath that thing?" Merle asks, with that waggle in his eyebrows that would have gotten him smacked by any number of them, especially Lup. Lucretia decides to ignore him and soldier on.

"And the three of you look like Little Nemos." Before she realizes what she's done, the reference to a children's story on their homeworld leaves her mouth. She's getting careless, these days, and waits to see if they heard static for a long moment, heart in her stomach. They don't react, waiting for her to continue with their briefing. She escapes, gratefully, to more solid conversational ground. "Merle, I can see three-fourths to four-fifths of your entire butt."

Everyone laughs, including Merle.

"Sorry I'm cheating you of one fraction," he says, tugging on his butt flap. 

Lucretia puts her head in her hands. "You look like Jeffy from Family Circus." This reference she knows is safe and also distressingly accurate.

"This is my sleepy sack! I get night terrors," Taako pipes up, clearly looking for a laugh. Lucretia winces. She knows exactly why he gets night terrors and makes a mental note to see about finding an apothecary on the surface. 

"The three of you will need --" she attempts to cut them off at the pass.

"Somebody unzip me!" Taako yells. Lucretia sighs deeply and gives her best Directorly glare.

"The three of you are going to need to suit up into  _your_  business regalia, because I have a job for you that I need you on  _right now."_

"Well, give me like, 45 minutes," Magnus says.

"You don't  _have_  45 minutes. At most, I can give you four." 

"Okay," he says, and starts stripping.  _Some things never change_ , Lucretia thinks, and ignores him the way she always has - telling him to get naked elsewhere usually just prolonged the experience. She can't help but notice he's accrued quite the collection of scars, and resists the urge to ask him about the last decade. She saw enough, checking in on them all once a year.

"Three of that's going to be hair product!" Merle says, gleefully. He's summarily ignored. Lucretia presses on. 

"Mere hours ago, one of our Reclaimers, a brave soldier named Leeman Kessler was murdered in the city of Rockport."

"Aw, bummer!" Magnus says, still butt-ass naked. Lucretia glares pointedly at him.

"And his murder came at a most inopportune time, because he managed to locate --"  


"Also, I would ask, when would a murder come at an  _opportune_  time?" Magnus butts in. Taako cackles.

"His murder came at a most inopportune time because he had just managed to locate and retrieve one of the Grand Relics," Lucretia says, voice strained, looking over her notes, eyes glazed with sleep.  "Last night, we received a missive telling of his success, but before we could extract him, a thick fog set in over Rockport, which prevented us from sending a sphere to collect him and the relic. However, there  _is_ a commuter train that operates out of Rockport that runs from Rockport through the Teeth, the mountain range that separates the continent below and ends in Neverwinter, where we could more safely and discreetly extract him. He managed to secure passage on this train, loaded his cargo on the train, but before it could depart, he was murdered. Which is leaving us in, ah, quite a sticky situation."

"Hmm," Merle says, stroking his beard. Lucretia struggles to stay serious. 

"Do we know anything about the murderer or how, like, it actually went down?" Magnus asks, a surprisingly good question for a man struggling to put his pants on. 

"We know nothing, we haven’t been able to get into contact with the authorities— and even if we could, there’s not much information we could.... tell them. It could— it could lead to, I don’t know. It could lead to a very difficult situation for us. We can’t explain what he was doing there, why he was murdered— we don’t even know why he was murdered because, ostensibly, nobody would know about the Grand Relic unless they were in the Bureau of Balance.  There’s—we have a lot of unknowns," she finishes. 

"Do we know the status of the relic right now?" Taako asks.

"It's on the train as far as we know. And that is where...the three of you come in. We will need one of you, it's up to you to decide --" 

"Dibs! " Taako yells. Lucretia tries to keep her eye-roll completely internal. She most definitely regrets leaving this decision up to them, despite the fact that Taako is absolutely correct, he is the most capable actor of the three of them. 

"Oh...kay, that was..." she gives up on trying to explain and continues with her briefing. "We will need one of you to impersonate Leeman--"

"Double dibs!" Taako yells, and Lucretia resists the urge to kick him in the shins. 

"Leeman Kessler," she finishes, making her point. "I have secured two other tickets on the train, so all three of you can board, but one of you will need to be Leeman Kessler. You will need to retrieve the relic and get it back to us any way that you can."

"What can you tell us about --" Magnus says, putting his socks on.  


"What did Leeman look like?" Merle asks.

"Yeah, what race was he?" Taako asks.

"Leeman was a half-elf," Lucretia says, "but there was no guarantee that the operators of the Rockport Limited even know what he looked like. He could have secured his ticket in advance, so it's up to you. Any one of you can be Leeman, whoever has, I guess, the most panache, the most  _flair for the dramatic_ , whatever it takes, we'll need you to..." She sighs in exasperation. "We'll need you to make believe. Make pretend. Like a couple of actors. Or just one actor." She looks expectantly at Taako. 

"You know, I'm actually bad at acting? So I'm gonna diparooski," he says. Magnus laughs heartily. 

"What will the other two be doing?" Merle asks, apparently completely sincere, despite the stupidity of his question. Lucretia does her best to not gape.

"The other two will be ensuring that the new Leeman Kessler, the fresh-off-the-block Leeman Kessler, isn't murdered. Because obviously, someone's going around murdering Leeman Kesslers. This will also  be a security job. You don't have to figure it out right now," she starts speaking slowly to make sure her point gets across. Briefings are usually not this rowdy, especially not at three in the morning. She's mostly just glad Magnus is fully clothed.

"If someone needs a bodyguard, I'd say I'll be Leeman and that way our  _best fighter_  is able to protect me and our  _best magician_  is able to protect me," Merle says, with more than a hint of irony. 

"Oh, I'm  _flattered_ ," Taako says.

"As opposed to all our other magicians," Magnus says, with too much malice to let Lucretia forget that this is not one of their old briefings, with gentle teasing and cockamamie plans and binding warp and weft of love.

"Okay," Lucretia says, flatly.

"Well, it's, listen, it's semantics!" Taako says, clearly defensive. He shouldn't feel the need to be defensive. 

"What can you tell us about the artifact?" Magnus cuts in . 

"Uh, we don't know." Lucretia starts searching for things she can tell them about the relic she understood the least. Davenport kept to himself in the days following their fateful crafting, and she knows very little, even now, about its power beyond creating illusions so seductive they destroy their creator. "We can't, we don't, we sort of--"

She's both grateful and annoyed when Magnus cuts her off. "What the  _shit_?" 

It gives her a moment to collect herself and formulate some kind of pat response to explain the importance of their mission without divulging too much information. Or worse, static. 

"Well, we know he collected an artifact, but if that missive had been intercepted in the air, we - that information, that incredibly valuable and  _dangerous_  information could have fallen into enemy hands, so we purposefully kept it vague." She mentally crosses her fingers and hopes this satisfies them. 

"Well, great," Magnus says. Lucretia can't tell if he's being sarcastic or not. 

"Let's do it!" Merle says, having zoned out for the past few moments. 

"Are you gonna fire us out of the cannon?" Taako asks.

Lucretia looks at the three of them in turn, dead serious. "We absolutely are going to fire you out of a cannon." 

"Yay!" Merle and Magnus say. Taako looks slightly nauseated. 

"One more question before we go: How do the gauntlets work?" Magnus asks. Lucretia looks at him askance. 

"The what now?" She thought her eyebrows couldn't go any higher on her forehead, but here she is.

"The gauntlets, the bracers."

"Our bracers," Merle clarifies, ever-helpful.

"Oh, you just -" 

"The bracers!" Taako says, and he's slow enough on the uptake Lucretia tries her best to assume he's joking, and lobs a joke back at him.

"Point and click, baby. Windows 98."

"Okay, cool. Where's Killian?" Magnus asks, deeply sincere. Lucretia pinches the bridge of her nose. "Is she gonna come with? I'd feel better if she were there." 

Lucretia rubs her eyes. She's still not used to experiencing their particular brand of bullshit again. "Killian? Killian is a Regulator. She cannot go with you on reclaiming missions."

"Well, can we signal for her if we get in trouble?" he asks, puppy-dog eyes in full effect.

"The only way you will signal for her is if you find the artifact and use it," she says, deliberately enunciating. 

"And keep it, right?" Taako says, and she does not want to know what he's scheming. 

"And then she will Bat-signal, yes, she will sound off, and she will come, but not for hang time, she will kill all of you." Lucretia says, imbuing her voice with extra gravitas to drive her point home. She's living past hope, closer to her goal than she's been in a decade, and yet, she can't be sure that they'll survive this mission unscathed. She would be more than confident in their combat skills, but they've changed more than she bargained for. She worries if their retrieval of the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet was a fluke, if in erasing their role in the relics' creation, she erased their ability to handle them without consequences. She pushes these thoughts to the back of her mind and quells the tremor in her voice. 

"Can we bring Billy Bluejeans back?" Merle asks, laughing through mock tears. 

Before she can stop herself, Lucretia corrects him, a reflex forged after hearing him misremember everyone's name hundreds of times.  "Barry Bluejeans --" she starts, then realizes her error and stops cold in her tracks.

"Uh, how quickly you forget, huh?" Taako says, rolling his eyes. "Barry must have made a real impact on you." He starts to make for the door. Lucretia dismisses them with a wave of her hand, icy knot in her stomach.

She makes a mental note to step up her surveillance, so she can try to get a bead on Barry's lich form. She knows deep down that he's probably dangerous, deranged, more power than anything else. She's never heard of a lich avoiding corruption when their link to the world is gone. 

Mission briefing concluded, Madame Director heads to the library to research wards. Erasing their latest casualty is routine work that can wait until morning. The Rites of Remembrance, she had named them, in the midst of a particularly ironic phase. When dawn breaks over the moon base, she returns to her suite to start another day, kindling hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you very much for reading! please let me know what you thought in the comments below, or come yell at me on tumblr at emi--rose. new updates come on wednesdays and sundays!


	4. see the truth about yourself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lucretia meets fisher for the first time. the boys return the oculus.

Lucretia can't seem to sleep, can't concentrate on anything after she sends the Reclaimers to complete Leeman Kessler's mission. She dawdles in her office, making sure that she dots every i and crosses every t on the paperwork for the Rites of Remembrance that she can't even perform anymore. She remembers with a sinking in her gut her first attempt to feed Brian's memory to Fisher. Their bellowing shriek of pure distilled anger and grief echoes unbidden in her ears. She can't face them again, not now, not soon, maybe not ever. 

The secret office where she keeps the baby voidfish - Junior, as she's taken to calling them - is littered with painful reminders of the past, but it's exactly the kind of self-flagellation Lucretia needs. She touches a hand to Junior's tank and they wave their tentacles excitedly at her, twisting in the water with delight and unquenchable curiosity. Seeing Junior underscores the sharp place in her memories where she thinks of decades spent with Fisher in their tank, floating happily next to her bunk. She slumps into the old ratty armchair she's stowed here and gives in to the urge to let these repressed memories bubble to the surface, lonely memories that no one else on the planet could even comprehend. 

###

Lucretia's been asking Magnus for weeks about the menagerie of progressively more anatomically correct wooden ducks he spends hours crafting. Her desire to understand what these strange floating jellyfish are and do has far outweighed her fear. The day they present their works at the conservatory, Lucretia brings her crewmates to tears with a painting of the city center market they would frequent. Her success is bittersweet. After the submission ceremony has concluded,   


The small floating jellyfish is frantic at the mouth of the cave, meets Magnus and begins to lead him deep in the mountain. Lucretia extends a hand in an effort to be polite and the creature recoils and tries to hide behind Magnus. He laughs, hopeful, somehow, even in the midst of this hell, and tries to calm them. "No, no, she's not only super nice, she also likes collecting. She collects too, just like you!" He grins disarmingly at Lucretia. 

She drinks in the scene, wide-eyed, for just a moment. She makes a snap decision and opens the ever-present journal at her hip to a page showing a detailed series of botanical drawings. The creature trills questioningly and she makes a gesture of encouragement. It brushes a tentacle gently along the page and nudges Lucretia's shoulder in a friendly gesture. She laughs brightly, despite her trepidation, and follows them deep into the cave. 

The passage opens onto a larger chamber with dozens of similar jellyfish creatures floating and dancing and intensely curious about the new visitor in their midst. One splashes excitedly out of the pool at its center, narrowly avoiding the dripping stalactites, drenching Lucretia in a wave of stagnant fish water. She turns her body to protect her precious journals and tastes calcium and fish poop and gods know what else in the deluge of nastiness. 

"Oh God, oh  _God,_ it doesn't smell very good, Magnus. It got in my  _mouth_ , this is  _awful_ , why do you keep coming," she splutters, spitting on the floor to try to erase the taste of being doused.

"That was a mistake! That was a mistake. Duh,  you gotta keep your mouth closed in situations like -- once you get splashed, trust me, what, do you want pink eye? You gotta close your eyes, cover your mouth, c'mon. It's day one stuff," he says with a wink and a playful nudge. She laughs as she sits on the floor, opens her journal, and starts sketching the creatures. 

###

They're fleeing the Legato Conservatory as the apocalypse rains down from above, and Lucretia is running faster than she ever has before towards the voidfish's cave. The landscape is greyed out and the sky is pitch black and they run without thinking, in shock at the early arrival of the Hunger. Davenport had given them two minutes, and Magnus had sprinted off towards the cave without a second thought. 

"Magnus! We have to go! Get it or don't, but we've gotta go. C'mon!" Lucretia yells into the cave, voice tight with panic. Her heart threatens to beat out of her chest. She hears objectively terrible singing grow louder and louder and then she is sprinting again, breathing hard, firing off as many Magic Missiles as she dares, striking down the shadows that nip at their heels. 

Davenport flings them into the sky, pushing the ship to its absolute limit of acceleration, and as they pass through the barrier between worlds, there's no time to mourn this plane that they have abandoned to its fate. Lucretia fixes her gaze on the floating jellyfish until she can't see anything but a million refractions of herself bound in bright silver. Her vision whites out. All she can do is hope. 

Lucretia holds her breath until the light fades. When she's reformed next to Magnus who is next to Fisher, seemingly none the worse for wear, she's overwhelmed with relief and a sense of hope she hasn't felt in decades. Within days, she and Magnus have together found a glass tank big enough for Fisher to grow into, and makes sure to entertain them by feeding them stories and poetry, a habit she continues as long as they allow it. 

* * *

Lucretia waits with waning patience for her Reclaimers to return with the Oculus. Her greatest worry, for a change, is how Davenport will react to the return of the relic he crafted, as opposed to her typical litany of concerns about spellwork. 

"I can't believe you've done it again. I can't believe you've done this," she says, conjuring her best leaderly persona. She's not lying, not exactly, she shouldn't have doubted them at all but given the startling incompetence they showed in their initiation and training, she was legitimately concerned about their ability to retrieve any more relics and successfully resist their thrall. Their successful return crosses another worry off of her nearly endless list of things to worry about, and she lets herself hope, briefly. Then she remembers that this day will start their yearlong clock, the constant ticking that governed their peripatetic century, the sword of Damocles hanging over her head again. 

She's snapped out of her reverie by a guard clanking unsubtly into the receiving room. Jimothy, she remembers his name as. She wonders for a moment why her organization attracts people with the most ridiculous names. 

"Put it right in there, brother!" he says, weirdly pompous, popping the lead ball open. Taako does as he's told. 

Once the sphere is in place in the destruction chamber, Lucretia takes a deep breath, draws the curtain, and sets her elaborate illusion in motion. Just as with the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet, everything goes off without a hitch. She allows herself a quiet sigh of relief. Tonight, she will undo Davenport's work and begin the long work of saving them from the tyranny of beginning again. 

"You have just destroyed another incredibly powerful relic. That relic was imbued with impossible illusion magic. It's called the Oculus. Rift. No." She laughs ruefully. "It's just called the Oculus. And it - it is able to turn anything you create with illusion magic into something real. Into something tangible."

"But that sounds great!" Magnus exclaims.

"It really - it sounds awesome," Taako says.

"It's really great - unless you use it to conjure an illusory army, or some sort of illusory dragon," Lucretia says, patience wearing thin, recalling the horrors wrought by those who wielded the Oculus after Davenport let it go. 

"Still sounds great. Very great," Taako says, and Lucretia bites off her instinctive response. She could excoriate him for all the horrors  _he_  caused with the Philosopher's Stone, she could throw her hand, she could make him understand. Or she could carry on. She should, and she shall. 

"Or an illusory black hole that then destroys the world," she says, not even bothering to hide her irritation under the deep joy she feels in seeing them return safely. She catches herself just in time to avoid making a vore joke, the way she would have every time the Hunger showed up to make her crewmates yell about how gross she was and how gross those jokes were, and why did Merle ever teach them what that meant anyways. 

"Not seeing a downside," Merle says. Lucretia glares at him.

"But - but we could have used that for so much good!" Magnus says. It breaks Lucretia's heart to hear him sound so much like his younger idealistic self. Instead of allowing herself to remember when he proposed  _exactly that_ , she pinches the bridge of her nose and toes the party line she's set.

"You cannot use the Grand Relics for good. They - their power overwhelms and inevitably leads only to evil," she begins.

" _We_  could have used it for good! The power, as long as it was wielded responsibly," Magnus argues. It chills her to the bone to hear him make the same argument he did so long ago. 

"You better keep that shit in check," she snaps. Merle laughs, ever unprofessional. "Because that, that sort of thinking will consume you, and tear you apart from your friends, and lead you to create a rival Bureau...faction." It takes her a moment to realize the irony of warning her friends against doing exactly what she did. 

"You're probably right, this will probably never come up again," he says, dripping with a sarcastic bite she's not used to hearing from someone usually so earnest. 

"Sorry, but once Magnus gets started thinking about something it's hard to stop. He's like a runaway train never coming back," Taako says, snickering to himself. He high-fives Merle. 

Lucretia looks at them in turn, eyebrow perfectly arched. "I take it your adventure involved the train?" 

"Well, yeah, you knew that. You sent us down there to get on the train. Come on," Magnus says, as if this is the most obvious thing in the world.

"Yeah, you know the story," Taako adds. She does not, in fact, know the story. 

"I just would have thought that you would have used your powers of persuasion to get the relic off the train before it even departed, but the way you did it was certainly interesting," she says, perhaps too generous.

"Well, that's what we're here for," Magnus says. 

"Ours had  _murther,"_ Taako says with a smirk. 

"Had what?" Lucretia asks, dumbstruck again by how ridiculous these three can be.

"Yeah," Magnus says, grinning now.

"Murther.....most foul," Taako says. Lucretia ignores him. 

"We made some good friends," Magnus says, sensing that she has no desire to continue along this pathway of terrible puns. "And we grew closer as a group along the way!" She nods. She hadn't thought it was possible to be more heartbroken, but here she is.

"Well, friendship, I would say," she begins, gathering herself, willing herself to not think about the friendships she sacrificed, "is the greatest reward that you can receive in this life or any other life." It's something she doesn't deserve anymore, she thinks.

"That said," Magnus blathers on, "it  _is_ important that when we erase this from everyone's memories, we also erase it from, like, Angus and Graham. I don't want those people calling us." 

Lucretia takes a moment to collect herself. She's survived hundreds of awful, interminable meetings, some incredibly stupid new hires asking even more stupid questions, and yet, these three take it out of her more than anyone else. She reminds herself to be patient and counts her breaths. "That won't be necessary," she finally says, evenly, scary calm. "We won't need to erase anyone's memory on this job because you didn't destroy a city this time." She emphasizes the last words expectantly.

"We destroyed a garden," Merle says sheepishly. Lucretia suppresses a dirty joke and a cackle. 

"Yay! Is this our quarterly review?" Magnus asks, giving zero shits that they destroyed a serial killer's garden. 

"This is your quarterly review," Lucretia says, latching on to the opening he's given her. "Compared to last time, 100 percent year over year improvement. Do y'all wanna get paid or nah?" 

They chorus their assent one after the other, and Lucretia calls for Davenport. He emerges from her office and she hopes against hope that he'll say something, anything else. When he says his name, she grimaces. The boys take their payment and she dismisses Davenport with a wave, unable to fathom the thought of facing him any longer. 

"And how much is the stuff in Taako's bag worth?" Magnus asks, snapping Lucretia away from her train of thought. 

"What? Uh, sorry, what?" 

"The stuff clanking around as we walked around town," he says, as if this will clarify things for her.

"That's my CPAP machine," Taako says, already halfway out the door. "Thanks for bringing it up, though. That's really nice. Wow, what scumbags you are, huh? Guy's got one fallibility, gotta rub it in his face. It's not funny," he says, grudging, without a hint of the wink and nod he usually had when mocking himself.

Lucretia watches them go and prepares herself for yet another flood of HR complaints from Leon and their attendant meetings with Brad. She's glad to have them home, she reminds herself. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading and for putting up with my suddenly-erratic update schedule! things may continue to be erratic due to the demands of medical school in the future, so i ask your patience. comment here or come yell at me on tumblr @emi--rose if you have thoughts! hopefully this will update in the next few days and we can get back on a reasonable semblance of a schedule.


	5. look west and look away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the countdown begins. merle has a beef. taako defends pringles (the person).

Lucretia waves her wand, quells the tremor in her hands, and amplifies her voice over the whole quad full of revelers. "Attention everyone, the eclipse is about to take place, if you would like to join us in the yard, and join us for the viewing of the eclipse, it should be here in about a minute or so." She dispels the amplification spell and curses quietly to herself. She's been anxious, more anxious than usual, since she pulled the Light from the Oculus and channeled it into her staff. 

She knows the Hunger is coming, but it's been long enough that part of her hopes that things will be different this time. The more practical side of her knows that the lead time they gave themselves by splitting the Light has almost certainly come to an end, and the scouts will arrive and start the doomsday clock any day. 

When the sky darkens, Lucretia is immediately aware that this is not the normal shadow of the real moon eclipsing the sun, no, this is the thunderclap that heralds the harbingers of the apocalypse. Her time is now running out. The cacophony expands and sweeps through the quad, leaving prone bodies and confusion in its wake. Lucretia hears millions of dissonant whispers and the sound of a thousand orchestras tuning. It grips her heart in a fear that is at once familiar and newly intense. The possibility of the worst end - a new beginning - becomes uncomfortably real. Hundreds of eyes watch her, notice her, seek her, and then disappear.

Lucretia has barely had time to sit up and catch her breath when she hears the unmistakable yell of a shaken Magnus Burnsides from across the quad. 

"What was in that dick you sold me?!" he yells, as usual, joking to hide his fear. He shouldn't - can't, mustn't - remember the Hunger's scouts, but the visceral terror they impart is so profound nothing could erase it entirely. "Everybody just stay calm! If someone tries to hand you bad dick, just - just say no. Say no to bad dick!" His voice gets closer. Lucretia mentally prepares herself for whatever this conversation is going to be. "What was that? What in the world was that? Has that happened before, or --" 

"No, I --" Lucretia tries to cut him off at the pass, before he steps too close to the static. 

"Like, a thing?" he says. He looks at her quizzically for a moment, then slaps her across the face. 

Before she can think, she reacts the way she always had when they got in teasing fisticuffs. She slaps him back. "Booyah," she says. She regrets it instantly, not just for the optics of evidently smacking one of her employees, but for the flood of memories that she does not have time to handle at this particular juncture. She shakes her head, clarifies her thoughts, and puts on a show. "No, that's uh, that's the first --" she cuts herself off, not technically lying yet. She's seen the Hunger and its scouts a hundred times before, but it's the first time in this plane, technically, and that is a small comfort for her.  "I need you all to debrief with me, in my office, but first, let's wake everyone up and make sure everyone's alright." She turns to the nearest employee and smacks them gently across the face. Magnus follows suit, happily slapping everyone he can get his hands on. Lucretia takes a deep breath and does her best to quell the churning in her stomach. The clock is ticking.

 

* * *

The air is impossibly still. The sky is impossibly black. Lucretia assumes it is her literary bent that makes her mentally describe it as hanging in the sky, pressing down and seeming to consume the entirety of the horizon. She is quickly proven wrong as the imperceptible flattening of colors into grayscale accelerates and it is suddenly apparent to everyone in attendance that a catstrophe is imminent. She says nothing as the bond engine kicks on, and they lift off, urgently now. The ship dives and rolls and flits between tendrils of this thirteenth plane looming large in the space in between reality.

Lucretia is frozen, not in fear, but in intense concentration, so that she will not forget. She won't allow it. They slip between realities and on the invisible incomprehensible boundary, time stops and stretches like taffy and compresses into a pinpoint that explodes into a shower of light and an infinity of kaleidoscoped images of everyone aboard. Lucretia, in all her iterations, torn apart and reassembled, takes in every detail, determined to survive if only so she can record the sheer magnitude.

Days later, when the shock of their circumstances has begun to sink in, Lucretia opens a journal and labels it "Home". She sits at her desk, the familiarity of her task inadequate balm, and pauses, pen poised above the first page. She closes her eyes and pulls a useless piece of trivia from the depths of her mind, the first step in making sense of it all. 

Population: 6142779

She stares at the numbers, stark on the plain background, and they blur with the unbidden prick of tears at her eyes. She blots her eyes carefully, waits for the ink to dry, and closes the journal.

* * *

Once the anxious masses have been placated, Lucretia returns to her office, echoes of memories careening around her. Davenport is at her elbow, seemingly none the worse for wear, except for his silence as he hands her a cup of tea, stirs his own cup, and sits in his customary chair in the corner of her office. He motions for the Reclaimers to sit across from Lucretia's desk, and they do so without a fuss.

"I -- I was incapacitated by whatever happened out there. I need you all to describe to me what -- what happened? Are we under attack?" She chooses her words carefully, treading lightly through lies and misdirections.  She needs to know what they saw, what was static, if the scouts were even comprehensible. She needs to point them down the path of the common enemy, not the admittedly harder path of questioning her authority. 

"It was wacky," Magnus says, ever so helpfully, already being interrupted by Taako.

"Oh, talk about your unreliable narrators, we, there was a loud, then bright, wait, no, bright first, and  _ then _ loud." 

Lucretia stares at Taako agog.

"No, no, loud and  _ then _ bright!" Merle says, muddying the waters. Lucretia suppresses the urge to facepalm. 

"I thought it was at the same time," Magnus says.

"There was sort of a confluence, right?" Taako says.

"Yeah, and it sounded like a bunch of, uh, instruments? String instruments?" Magnus says.

"A cacophony," Taako says, trailing off.

"Imagine if you played like, eight Polyphonic Spree albums at the same time, but like, just a little bit too fast," Magnus decides. Lucretia knows exactly what he means, since he was oftentimes the one to make stupid choices with the ship's intercom, the notable exception being the Ghost Horse song. That was one hundred percent Taako and Lup. And now she’ll have the Fantasy Lin Manuel Miranda jam stuck in her head the rest of the day while she tries to figure out what exactly her game plan for the year is. Great.

She takes a moment to clear her head, then tries to get the meeting back on track. She clears her throat. “Okay, did you see anything? In addition to the —“

Magnus cuts her off. “A bunch of, like, ovals,” he says, and she’s not sure if he could see the scouts at all.

“Eyes,” Merle says, definitively, a little far away.

“There were, yeah, eyes, it was eyeballs,” Magnus stammers. Lucretia makes a  _ hmm _ noise, and he coughs, clears his throat, tries to get reoriented. “And they, uh, they looked kind of glorious, but a little bit evil.” Lucretia’s heart stops. She remembers redacting the logs of their conversations about the Hunger, and choosing to let him remember the phrase “kind of glorious, but a little bit evil”. It was too good a turn of phrase to remove from the world. Now, she wishes she’d wiped it. There’s no way out but through, she reminds herself, and steps neatly back into her persona as Madame Director.

“Our Seekers on the ground have reported back to us and have told us that nobody on the surface of the world saw or heard anything peculiar. So whatever you saw, you were the only ones who saw it. This was not a worldwide phenomenon, it just happened to us, up here, up on the moon." She needs to protect them, protect herself, and the clock is ticking, time is running out, she is alone and the only thing standing between them and the apocalypse. She tightens the already white-knuckle grip she has on her staff.

"It was moonwide," Merle says, as if he's sharing some great wisdom with them.

"Could this be the work of some evil organization spying on us?" Magnus asks, not terribly far off the mark from a purely technical perspective. 

Lucretia sighs to herself and treads lightly. "I don't know what it was, but I need you to not tell anyone what you've told me today. Even inside of the Bureau, until we understand what we're up against." She glares to underscore her point.

"Oh. I already Tweeted it," Magnus says, shit-eating grin plastered on his face. Merle and Taako break out into giggles in the background. Of all the roadblocks Lucretia had imagined when she planned to bring the three of them aboard, "failing to recognize how serious a situation is" was one she'd - correctly - placed at the top of her list. 

"What do you mean, you told it to a bird?" she chooses the deadpan route, hoping to get it out of their systems to return to the issue at hand.

"I told it to the birds. And the bees," he adds. 

"You made love? I don't under--" 

"I made love to birds." He pauses. Lucretia raises her eyebrows threateningly. "I was a little bit stoned on unicorn dick," he finishes. 

Lucretia counts backwards from five in her head. "Whatever you do in your  _ spare time _ is your business, but it's of the utmost importance that you don't tell anybody what you saw until we understand  _ what it is _ that you saw. And --"

Magnus interrupts her again. "Okay. We'll just tell Killian and our roommate Pringles." 

"Nope. Don't tell. Nope." She takes a split second to process the nickname. " _ Pringles?! _ "

"Whatever his name was." Magnus falls too easily into their old pattern of banter, him or Merle making up increasingly-ridiculous nicknames for people whose proper names he full-well remembered, her topping whatever he concocted with a straight face, ad infinitum, killing time together.

"Robert." It would be one thing for the memory to hurt too much to face, after all, that's the life she's set for herself. It's another entirely for the icy grip of fear around her heart to let her have even a moment of familiar levity.

"Robrit?" Magnus says, barely suppressing his laughter. But of course, _of course_ _he keeps going_ , he would always keep going until he cajoled a laugh from her. This is too much the Magnus she knew, and she's glad to see that this instinct, at least, has survived.

Taako's laugh burbles up from somewhere dormant inside him. "He just -- he just  _ wanted _ Pringles!" He wheezes a little, then collects himself enough to continue. "That can't define him for the rest of his life!"

"Well, sometimes that's just how you get a nickname!" Magnus interjects, crossing his arms in punctuation. 

Lucretia glares, and the two of them pipe down, sensing with only the most heavy-handed implication that the fate of the world is in their hands. She had planned for this moment, she reminds herself, and launches into the script she'd prepared ages ago, what feels like a lifetime ago, when she thought this would be - not easy, but not  _ this _ . "I believe that this is an ill omen, and we must hasten our efforts to gather the Relics because if a --" she catches herself before she says 'the Hunger', scrambles for the word she'd artfully chosen so long ago, and makes a recovery "-- if a storm is brewing, we cannot hope to weather it if we are busy putting out the fires that threaten to consume our world." And this, she reminds herself, is not a lie. They will not survive like this, hollowed out with the Light divided, she is certain.

But survive they must. Before Lucretia can sink any further into her perseverations about their uncertain future, Taako steps in, jolts her out of self-pity and every kind of worry.

"Mmm, that sounded really cool," he says, real admiration under the mockery, something Lucretia can't help but detect, wishes she couldn't hear it and remember how, whenever she needed it, he would cut her prosody down to size. 

"Yeah, that was good, did you write that?" Magnus asks, ever earnest. 

Lucretia responds without thinking. "No, that was off the dome." She's impatient, now, with their dithering. Trying not to show it. Searching for a way to make them see the dire gravity of the situation without veering too close to the forbidden, letting them remain  _ just oblivious enough _ . 

"Well, first, I think you oughta investigate that can game bastard," Merle says, and Lucretia can't decide if this is a defense mechanism - willful ignorance in the face of a dramatic threat is not his usual M.O. but she's learned not to expect consistency anymore - or if he's just that dense. She takes a deep breath, pinches the bridge of her nose, and considers the probable efficacy of dope-slapping some sensible priorities into him. 

"Yeah, that guy's got a whole --" Taako tries to yes-and, and Lucretia knows she has to cut him off at the pass or she'll be here all day, losing precious tea-and-murderboard-review time to another insane scheme.  

"No, I'm sorry, you're right, you're right," she deadpans, with a little bit more venom than she might have intended. She's anxious and facing down the apocalypse, though, and hopes they cut her a break. Not that they would know the difference. They laugh, another reminder that they're all meaner than they used to be. Herself included. She rolls her eyes and continues, secretly hoping one of them will stop her from beating the comedic dead horse. "Before we hasten our efforts to collect the Grand Relics that threaten to destroy our world, I'll look into a seedy carnival game owner and operator." 

Merle looks suitably chastened. "Alright, foreshadowing, that's all I'm saying." He crosses his arms and glances at the door.

"Good, good," Taako says, letting her slide. 

Lucretia's wrung dry, and even though it's barely the afternoon she can barely keep the irritation out of her voice. "You're dismissed,  _ please _ ."

Magnus looks concerned. "The - are we  _ fired _ ?"

She doesn't even laugh. "No, just, go. I'm tired. I'm very, very sleepy."  _ And irritated _ , she doesn't add. 

"Gonna get on the case early tomorrow, huh? The case of the mysterious carnival barker?" Taako jibes, over his shoulder, Merle and Magnus already out the door. The door shuts behind him and Lucretia hears a muffled, incomprehensible comment from the other side. 

She puts her head down on her desk. She has so much work to do, but for now, all she wants to do is sleep, and dream of home. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M BACK! It's been almost 8 months since I've written anything. Sorry. Med school happened. But! I'm trying to work on this little fic more, it means a lot to me and I want to finish it. Find me on tumblr at @emi--rose, and if you like this thing, please feed the writer beast with comments! Thanks for reading!


	6. if i make it through tonight, then i will mend my ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tres horny boys get briefed. lucretia makes road snacks. steven q fletcher, esq makes his debut.

A mile from the bluffs that gave the city of Goldcliff its name, a magnificent tempest brews. Towering slate-grey clouds consume the sky from horizon to infinity, wind and water whip to a froth, the air and the ocean are indistinguishable. A woman possessed stands at the eye of the storm, barely buffeted by the deadly winds. Her eyes are dark, glassy behind the raven's mask she wears. The death toll is two. 

###

Lucretia sits heavily behind the door to her sanctum sanctorum. The number, meant to be a painful reminder, punched in without thought. Just another password, now, stored in muscle memory. She leans over and opens one of seven masterfully worked wooden chests, with inlays from a violin that fell silent decades ago. The lid is quiet, well-oiled these days. Lucretia reaches in and pulls what was once the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet over her hand. For a moment, she is wracked by the cacophonous, freshly painful memory of the first time it was used. Over ten years ago, and it still hits her in the gut like it was yesterday. 

She flexes and extends her fingers, turning her hand as if seeing it for the first time, trying to ascertain its purpose. It's plain, now, where it used to sparkle with -- she hates herself a little bit for even thinking the cursed word but -- craveability. She winces at the thought. Another one of Magnus's shitty-yet-genius neologisms. She physically shakes the thought out of her head, pulls the now-mundane glove off, and closes the lid carefully behind it.

###

The report detailing the Raven's extraordinary, supernatural criminal exploits is buried midway through a teetering pile on the "inbox" half of Lucretia's desk, accumulated at an alarming rate over the weeks since the eclipse. If anyone's noticed that she's less efficient with paperwork these days, they've kept their mouths shut. If anyone's run into her pacing the quad in the wee hours, they've kept their mouths shut on pain of something indescribably awful. If anyone's been met with a steely-eyed red-rimmed glare for repeating something they heard from one of the new Reclaimers, well, they're troublemakers, and no one could fault their leader for trying to maintain discipline. 

Lucretia finishes her review of an exhaustingly detailed report of a small alpaca farm near the even smaller mountain town of Evereska. Lucretia sticks a fantasy Post-It on the front page reading "alpaca population > people population???" and sets the sheaf aside. She picks up the next task and her blood runs cold as she skims the first paragraph.

It's the Gaia Sash, yet another stupid name they (Merle) settled on, and it's taken someone's mind hostage: she's a petty-criminal committing less-than-petty crimes, she's creating storms the likes of which haven't been seen since the Sash destroyed the Moonshae Isles, and she has the power to shape plants, manipulate life. She's dangerous. Lucretia's hand is pressing the intercom button before she's consciously aware of it.

_ Protect them. _

The insistent thought flits at the periphery of her mind. 

_ Don't risk it _ . 

Lucretia visibly snarls, viciously clears her mind, and calls her Reclaimers. Davenport appears at her elbow as she begins to peruse the report in detail. This is how she will protect them all, she reminds herself.

###

By the time Merle, Magnus, and Taako make their way to her office, Lucretia has reviewed the entire Goldcliff report twice, and held a half-conversation with Davenport about its implications. She has to believe he understands when no one else will, as preposterous as that may seem. The way he says his name, the way she projects concern and thoughtfulness onto it, almost makes her believe. 

The Reclaimers dispense with such formalities as  _ knocking _ , shockingly in-character for them. 

She's poring over the report for a third time, murmuring quietly to herself, making little notes in the margin, practically illegible to herself let alone anyone else - and even though she specifically summoned the three of them to her office, she jumps out of her skin when they burst through the door. And if she's being honest with herself, she's still not used to having them around again. She wonders if she'll ever be. 

Lucretia grips her staff, taking comfort in the warm wood that hums with one-seventh of the most unimaginable power anyone has ever witnessed. She slips into her safe role as leader and boss and raps her staff on the floor, more to center herself than anything else.

"I have an urgent mission for you. You'll need to depart posthaste --" Lucretia says, with more than a touch of pompousness, and she winces internally at her use of the word "posthaste". She's laying it on too thick, trying to compensate, and she knows. 

And of course, Magnus interrupts her. Cocking his head, seeing through the bullshit smokescreen.  "Well,  _ hi _ ," he drawls. " _ Hell-ooo,"  _ he says, rolling his eyes in the most familiar way. 

Lucretia can't help but laugh. How could she not? Even at her lowest, Magnus jibing her could always draw her out of her shell, Taako making dumb jokes and throwing shit at her head could get a dodge and a laugh and a retort, Merle saying something weird and wise could always make her stop and think and take a step back. They were  _ good _ for her, in a way that the people she hired couldn't be. "Oh, sorry. Hey," she deadpans, doing her best to stay remote, if not cool and collected then at least deadpan. But the joke comes to the forefront of her mind unbidden, and she leaps at it. "Shimmy shimmy cocoa puff, listen to me now -" she's grinning, and the boys are laughing, and it's  _ right -  _ "wait, no, that's Country Grammar..." 

"How ya doin'?" Merle cuts in. 

Lucretia's taken aback by the question. She supposes that this is well within his MO, disarming people by asking them deep questions, questions they're not used to answering, and gods help her, "how ya doin'" qualifies as both for her. She shakes her head, quick and sharp, and gives a noncommittal answer. "I'm doing just fine. Uh." She's still taking a breath, preparing to brief them, when Magnus interrupts.

"Say hello to my fish."

This, at least is unsurprising. She knows Magnus's penchant for collecting various creatures and is wholly unsurprised to see him adopting anything he can get his hands on. At least, she thinks, she already banned dogs on the moon. She swings hard towards formality in an attempt to stifle the giggles she can feel in her chest. "You want me to --" 

"That's Steven!" Merle says, proud as anything of what appears to be a goldfish inside a magic ball. 

"You want me to addre-- oh, look at that. Yes. Well. I see you've got a little friend there. Does he do anything?" 

"He swims around in his tiny ball. And he loves me!" Magnus says, positively  _ beaming _ with pride. She's seen this before, of course, Magnus finding unconditional love from every creature he meets. And in some indirect way, she supposes, he's responsible for his current innervated state. After all, if he hadn't found Fisher, none of this would be possible. She pushes the thought from her mind with some force and tunes back in just in time to hear Merle being an ass.

"And right now he's doing his trick of swimming upside down on the surface of the water," Merle says, with too much venom for it to be just another one of his goofs. He's meaner now, she knows, not just to his friends but to his enemies. 

"Steven is not dead! Steven is eternal!" Magnus says indignantly, crossing his arms and giving a little stomp for effect. Merle is unmoved. 

"He's in a sphere! He's not in a fishbowl. How do you feed him? How do you--" 

Magnus interrupts him, doing his best to loom over Merle, who, unsurprisingly, gives zero shits. Lucretia was fond of that quality in Merle. "Steven is  _ eternal!" _

Merle rolls his eyes. "Ahh." Unconvinced.

Lucretia glares at each of them in turn, takes in Taako standing behind them, uncharacteristically quiet, winding and unwinding a thread from his shirt around his finger, and clears her throat. Merle and Magnus are still poised to bicker. She taps her staff on the floor. It resonates, and they listen.

"If you're quite done --" (making me remember how we used to bicker and banter, she wants to say) "--I have a job for the three of you." She pauses, expecting a question, or maybe a razzing. She gets silence and blank anticipation. "It should be quite, uh, much easier than your last job," she says, deviating from the script she'd planned, not having expected the need to sell them on this one. "Although your last job entailed you literally going to a train station and getting a thing out of a box." She teases without thinking, for a moment the power differential between them is smoothed out. 

Magnus looks like she kicked his puppy. "Well, there was a little bit more to it than that." Lucretia is instantly regretful.

"Terrific." She bites out the word, backpedaling over the distance she's trying to put between them. "I have a job for you. I need the three of you to report to the city of Goldcliff," she says, clipped and as formal as she can muster.

"Mhmm," Magnus mumbles, chastened. He looks like he's trying not to show something on his face, failing, and looking a little constipated in the process. Lucretia examines Merle and Taako and is met with similarly confused expressions.

"Certainly you've been? Certainly you're familiar with Goldcliff?" she asks, actually worried now - she didn't redact Goldcliff, didn't even redact the fact that Merle had been there, only the memory of him leaving the Gaia Sash there - could she have made a mistake? Or is she extrapolating, hyperbolizing, making something out of nothing? Regardless, she resolves to investigate, later, when the situation in Goldcliff is less urgent. 

"Very," Magnus says, as unsure as she's ever heard him sound. 

"We actually have only been to three places --" Taako starts.

"And they're no longer there." Merle finishes. Taako glares at him.

"...And most of them aren't there anymore," Taako says, spilling over into laughter. All three of them are in hysterics. Lucretia remembers when they hadn't laughed in months, when the thought of a place being erased was cause for despair, not jokes. She's chosen to shoulder this burden alone, and so she mourns quietly for the people they obliterated, alone. 

Lucretia steels herself, flares her nostrils, wills herself to stand straight and do her job. She decides that she must have made a mistake, somehow a memory got scrambled, and they really, truly don't remember Goldcliff, as much as Magnus may protest to the contrary. "Goldcliff. Certainly you've heard of...it  _ is _ the financial seat of power in the realm. It's where the money lives." 

"Of course," Magnus says, completely unconvincing. Lucretia soldiers on.

"There's a Grand Relic one of our seekers has found in the city of Goldcliff, and it is in the possession of a master criminal known as the Raven. We've been unable to apprehend the Raven --" She pauses as a flash of recognition sparks on Magnus's face. 

"Ugh. That's  _ so Raven _ !" he exclaims. A meme from at least half a century ago, if Lucretia had to venture a guess. Old enough that she would have to double-check its origin. He can't possibly remember the events surrounding the phrase, but she'll be damned if they remember all the old memes with none of the context. 

She settles for a non-committal "It is..." and is cut off by Merle. 

"First blow! Magnus!" he yells, echoing back to a meme war birthed during the beach year. 

Lucretia absolutely cannot deal with these memories now. She makes yet another concerted effort to push them to the side and lets herself believe that the moment is barely real. "The first of many, I assume." She knows the correct response and has to keep herself from blurting out static, chooses instead the milquetoast bureaucrat's response they expect from her. She plows forward with the briefing, abandoning her script, immediately regretting it. "The Raven is named for the black feathered mask she wears. You will need to apprehend her and retrieve the relic she has been using to wreak havoc all around Goldcliff. This time, I can actually give you helpful information as to the nature of this Relic."

"Sweet," Magnus says, a little bit too excited for her taste. "I...uh...just out of curiosity, this Raven, is she, like, evil? Chaotic neutral? Like, is she a Catwoman-esque figure, or...?" 

Lucretia is, naturally, taken aback. She cocks an eyebrow, squints at him, not sure what, exactly he means. Yes, the Raven is under a thrall and yes, she is an active threat, but she's not  _ evil _ , per se. She scrambles for an adequate metaphor and lands on "literary", broadly construed. "I'm almost certain that that sort of information - how - how should I say this?" She huffs, frustrated. "it should be developed throughout the course of your story, if your - if - life is like a story, I guess, if you want to think about it like that." She winces. Not her best delivery, but hopefully they can't tell the difference. "The relic she has used to...up her criminal game is called the Gaia Sash" -  _ Gaia Thong,  _ she hears Merle insist, in the same tone that Magnus insisted on  _ Time Cup,  _ except  _ way _ grosser - "which gives the wearer immense power over nature, it gives them immense power over the powers of wind and thunder and flora --"

"And heart and fire!" Magnus interrupts. Another in-joke, another stiletto to the gut.  _ It's just instinct, he can't remember that time, when we all piled into one berth and -- _ she stops herself, wrenching her train of thought away.

"Um..." She stares. She loses her train of thought for a moment, stammers, and picks up the pieces of her carefully-scripted briefing that's all shot to hell. "...And -- and what makes this so curious is that the Raven has taken up residence in one of the biggest cities in all the land, and not in the forest where she would be a god. She has been impossible to apprehend, thanks to the powers lent to her by the Gaia Sash. You will need to go to Goldcliff, work with the Goldcliff Militia to bring the Raven in, and secure the sash while still acting under the sort of level of discretion we require from you, without too many people....catching on to what you're going for." 

Taako pipes up from the chair in the corner, where he's somehow managed to contort himself into a bizarre position that is in no universe comfortable. "That sounds pretty easy. It sounds better than the train," he drawls.

"Yeah!" Magnus stands up, ready to go kick ass. Lucretia glares at him. He ignores it.

"I mean, it's harder because it's a whole city," Taako continues, "But if we just work at it, I'm sure we'll figure something out." Lucretia can't get a bead on whether or not he's being sarcastic. It's unsettling, for sure.

"If we just work together and stay positive!" Magnus says, absolutely sincere.

"Yeah, like he said," Taako says, deadpan still.

"Guys, we suck.  _ We suck!"  _ Merle says, with a new sincerity to his usual joking self-disparagement that Lucretia's not quite used to yet. 

"Speak for yourself, homie, I'm level 6," Taako says. 

Lucretia ignores him wholeheartedly and pointedly continues with her briefing, whatever of it she can still salvage, anyways. "I've been very  _ impressed _ with the three of your job performance, but you sound --" she searches for yet another half-truth that won't make her wince visibly "-- this level of confidence, I've never heard this from the three of you before." And it's the truth. She's never seen the three of them with so little confidence in their skills, not even when they were a bunch of scared kids having greatness thrust upon them. 

She leans hard on her staff, the warm wood grounding her as she soaks up its sense of security. The boys - her boys? - are laughing, still, caught up in the flight of banter that's so clearly making up for lost time. 

Magnus tries so hard to sound serious through the flight of giggles, Lucretia thinks for a moment he may hurt himself in the process. "I think it - a lot of it has to do with, uh," he dissolves into laughter for a moment, takes a breath, tries to smooth himself over and hide his absolute glee at making what's bound to be an absolutely asinine joke.  "Our yearly review is coming up pretty soon, and we're all hoping for a pay bump." 

It takes her a moment, really, a moment too long to respond, and part of her wishes they'd notice, wishes they'd reveal that this was all some elaborate prank they were playing, that they all got in too far over their heads, but it's just her, drowning herself, the butt of a sick cosmic joke. Bad-sick, she thinks automatically, before she remembers that Lup (still) isn't here to josh her about it. Lucretia forces what she hopes is a good approximation of the serious, Directorly look she's honed over the past decade. "Oh, I see. It's like The Secret. You're acting confident because you want money, which is the -- that's the secret right there." 

"Law of attraction, ya know?" Taako says, still grinning, still too goofy.

"One step forward, two steps back. We get together, she hates cigarettes and I like to smoke..." Another inside joke, one she's sure is safe, that she didn't redact, but she scrutinizes their faces for signs of that telltale dissonance anyway. Merle laughs, the way he always did, at the same lame joke. Magnus punches him none too gently on the arm. 

Taako looks at his nails in the way he does when he's dangerously bored. "Okay, uh, let's go see, do we need any relevant equipment for this, or should we just, like, get moving?"

"I mean if -- that's up to you, homie," Lucretia rejoinders. It catches him off balance, she can tell. It's probably the dichotomy. He can deal with it, she thinks, and presses on with the most hellishly interminable briefing she has ever conducted - or for that matter, participated in - during her century of briefings. 

"Got any leads?" Taako asks, with something that resembles humility. Probably the aftereffects of the train, Lucretia supposes. She's grateful for the chance to transition back to the formality of her briefing.

"We have a Seeker on the ground who you can get more information from, that you'll need to regroup with. He's also acting discreetly because his position is fairly high up and he doesn't want anybody knowing he works for a shadowy...cabal like ourselves." 

Taako blinks at her. "Is he with the militia? Do we have a way to get in contact with him?"

"I'm sure you'll figure that out," Lucretia says crisply. She questions her presupposition that she shouldn't need to explain the basics to them at this point. It's a crushing reminder of just how broken her family is, and she pushes it to the side, snapping her focus to the task at hand. She ignores the rushing in her ears that lets her know she will pay for this later.

"How 'bout a name? Can we have a name?" Magnus looks baffled by the concept of finding a contact without a name.

"Something? You've met us, right? Like, you've  _ met _ us?" Taako asks, at once too serious and too flip, a shadow of himself.

And with that, a silk thread snaps quietly, somewhere deep in Lucretia's psyche. She is unmoored, briefly, from herself, neither here nor there, watching herself respond on autopilot. "He's the director of the Goldcliff Militia. His name is --" She settles back into this body that is not her body. "His name is Captain Bane."

"There we go!" Taako says.

"Is 'Captain' his first name?" Magnus asks, holding back laughter.

"Captain Captain Bane, yes, it's --" she starts to explain, not sure what's going to come out, and Taako mercifully interrupts. 

"We're gonna get going, okay? Unless you have anything else to impart, any other leads, hot leads..." he says, already headed for the door. 

"Any road snacks?"

"Yeah, got any road snacks?"

She wants to tell them some kind of truth - that she hopes they stay safe, that she loves them, that she misses them, but before she can form the thought completely through haze and memory, they change the topic. Her numb lips form words that she barely remembers saying as soon as they've left her. "I've brewed you up a phial of gorp, and I think you're gonna love my special blend." She chides herself for saying anything at all, for making this last even a moment longer than it has to, but they bite, of course they do, and she keeps talking from outside herself, watching herself say everything her younger self would have laughed at, laughed with, riffed on. 

"Mmm...love?" Merle asks. Lucretia's surprised he's been paying attention at all.

"Don't say raisins," Taako says. She can't tell if he's joking or serious. Taako, of all people, should know what's in  _ gorp _ , for goodness' sake. Did she do that to him, too?

Lucretia's mind races while her mouth talks, saying whatever she can to fill the empty space, words echoing in her empty ears, falling back on old patterns, old jokes, giving as good as she gets. "It's not raisins. Those are a shoo-in for gorp. I think that's what the 'r' in gorp stands for," she says drily. The boys giggle, as if on cue. "No, my secret is, lean in close," she drops her voice. 

Taako leans in. Magnus leans away. Merle stays where he is, laughing heartily. "Pistachios," she whispers, loud enough for all three of them to hear. 

"Shelled?" Merle asks. Taako looks at him like he's crazy. 

"Yes, I leave the shells on them. Gives you stronger, sturdier teeth." It's reminiscent of the fake Fantasy Home Shopping Network infomercials they made once, on a world long gone, and the thought leaves a wake of nothingness rather than its usual guilt and pain. Lucretia notes this and sets it aside, a gently-wrapped gift for her future self to peruse, if she makes it that far. She idly hopes she won't. "Now get the hell out of my office," she says, and she hears it as a joke.

"You're a loose cannon!" Magnus says, oblivious.

"Are you saying to me right now you made  _ gorp-p? _ " Taako asks, absolutely incredulous. 

"I made gor - I actually call it pgorp. Please leave, you have stuff to do," she says, hearing her own voice muffled in her faraway ears. Magnus doubles over laughing. 

"Leave your badge and gun," Merle says, making no move to leave. 

"Gporp," Taako says through stifled giggles. 

"You don't have guns. Please go." They stare at her balefully. " _ Please go _ ," she says, and she sounds more panicked than insistent. "You're going to lose the trail," she adds. 

The Reclaimers leave in a cacophony of random gear and laughs punctuated with "pgorp" anagrams. When the door shuts behind them, Lucretia finally allows herself to exhale fully. She lets her head sink onto her desk, not feeling the smooth, cold wood that would usually ground her. She lifts her head, looks at her hands, and is mildly surprised to find that they aren't real, or possibly aren't hers. 

Davenport enters from the side room, whistling a jaunty tune from Tesseralia. "Davenport?" he asks delightedly.

" _ Davenport! _ " Lucretia snaps. "Learn some fucking tact." Her eyes glisten with long-suppressed tears. 

Davenport leaves without a word. A hot tear drips off Lucretia's chin. She swipes at it angrily, refusing to let another follow. 

_ I would rather be alone again, _ she thinks, before she can censor herself. She leafs through the dossier Bane prepared for her and pulls out her business Stone of Farspeech. She puts on her most formal persona, and calls her Seeker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr at emi--rose if you want to yell about my girl lucretia! thanks so much for reading! <3


	7. no haven safer than the one they tore down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lucretia warns captain captain bain. angus is a thorn in the bureau's side.

Captain Captain Bain picks up his Stone of Farspeech after half a ring. "Madame Director," he says.

"Bain," Lucretia greets him. She can't call him Captain, not least because Davenport, in earshot, might hear static, but because the word sticks in her throat. 

"I take it you received my report?"

"Yes. Very thorough work, I must commend you."

"Thank you, ma'am. This has been a long time coming."

"It certainly has. I need you to stay on top of things planetside. I'm sending our new Reclaimers down to rendezvous with you shortly, and I expect nothing less than unqualified success."

Lucretia drums her fingers on the desk, waiting for the pregnant silence on the other end of the line to resolve.

"Of course. If I may - is there any...additional information you could provide about the Gaia Sash?"

Lucretia frowns audibly. "Did you not receive the dossier I prepared for you?"

"I did, of course, but it was...sparse."

"I see." She stalls, taking a drink of her tea, hours cold. "I provided you with everything the Bureau has compiled on this Relic, Bain. I wish we had more information, but circumstances have forced our hand." She steeples her fingers. "How long has this Raven, this criminal, wielded the Sash?" 

Bain doesn't try to hide his frustrated exhale. "She's had it for a few weeks, as best we can tell. My lieutenant has been tracking her for almost a month now." 

"Are you  _ absolutely sure _ ? Everyone who's....who's ever interacted with a Relic like that before has been corrupted within days." Lucretia does her best to not think about Brian, to focus on the urgent task at hand. 

"I'm sure. I don't know what to tell you, ma'am. She's clearly corrupted, but she's been remarkably restrained with her use of the thing."

"Very well. I trust you. Please, report back to me as soon as the Reclaimers arrive."

"I will."

"And, Bain, if, for some reason, you have the opportunity to recover the Relic,  _ do not take it _ . It's too risky."

"But, Madame, I  _ was _ a Reclaimer, I'm sure I could handle it, I --"

"Do. Not. There's no reason to risk the thrall when we have a whole team who have proven themselves capable." Her voice is even, measured as ever, with no hint of the undercurrent of panic that flows cold through her veins. "Do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am. I would rather not find myself on the business end of Killian's crossbow."

"Few would."

"Anything else I should know? Not - Relic-wise, just in general?"

"Keep an eye on the racing scene. I have a....hunch the Reclaimers may find themselves involved." Less of a hunch, more of a memory of Magnus getting himself killed in a drag race for the Light, but she supposes that's splitting hairs. 

The Stone is silent for a long moment. "I can't imagine how that would happen, but I'll do my due diligence."

"Thank you. And, I cannot  _ believe  _ I have to tell you this, but  _ absolutely do not  _ interact with anyone who may be a Red Robe." She doesn't wince anymore when she says 'Red Robe', a hard-won victory.

"What the fuck? I thought they were all dead." The way Bain says 'dead' is a unwelcome reminder of Lup, one of far too many these days.

Lucretia takes a steadying breath. "As far as we know, they're gone, yes. However, I've received some concerning reports from Bureau operatives in the field --"  _ who've seen Barry's fucking lich form _ , Lucretia thinks, "--who have seen suspicious activity."

"Understood. Thank you for the information, ma'am." There's a commotion on the other end of the line, and Lucretia's stone goes dark. 

She is overcome with the nauseating certainty that Bain will meet the same fate as Brian. Lucretia had hired him just a few months before Junior was born, and he quickly proved his competence as a Seeker and his value as a political operative. She resolves not to grieve prematurely, and tries her best to kindle a seed of hope. 

 

###

 

Lucretia has barely ended her conversation with Bain when Davenport pokes his head into her main office.

"Davenport?" he says, inquisitively.

"Yes, Davenport, let them in. Thank you," she says, words heavier than ever.

Anaya, a young archivist, pokes her head into Lucretia's office. "Ah, hello, Madame, you probably don't remember who I am, I'm sorry to bother you, but --" 

Lucretia cuts her off. "Anaya, yes, with the archives? I remember hiring you, you were most impressive."

Anaya blushes dark green. "Thank you, madame. I, ah, have some intel you may appreciate?"

"Come in, don't just stand there. Sit," Lucretia gestures expansively, fully inhabiting her persona. "What have you found?"

"Well, madame, it's just - there's a little boy, in Neverwinter, and he's pinged my alarms three times today. It seems that he's a bit of a....savant? A prodigy? And he's taken on cases he absolutely shouldn't be able to. Missing persons cases from the Relic Wars, people who were corrupted, even employees of the Bureau."

Lucretia looks at her, steely-eyed, gaze boring deep. It makes the young archivist nervous as hell, and Lucretia knows it. 

"I see. Thank you. If you uncover anything else, please let me know immediately," she says crisply, and the young archivist leaves in an anxious rush. She knows exactly who this pint-sized savant is, and had been hoping to avoid this exact eventuality since the whole Train Incident. The Angus McDonald Problem will not resolve itself, and she finds herself faced with two options: murder, which is a negative for Bureau morale, or hiring a child, which is weird but definitely less of a PR problem. 

Lucretia frowns and pinches the bridge of her nose in deep exasperation. "Davenport?"

Davenport appears in the doorframe. "Davenport!"

"Davenport, could you please go fetch Brad from HR? I need to meet with him, urgently."

"Davenport," he says, whistling tunelessly as he does as he's told.

By the time Lucretia has drawn up a verbosely-titled policy proposal ("Risk Management and Liability Mitigation Strategy for the Employment of Minors"), Brad has put together a hiring packet with some hasty modifications and installed himself in his usual seat in Lucretia's office. 

"Found a thorn in our side, madame?"

"Something like that," Lucretia says absently, scanning the document for errors one last time. She takes his omnipresent clipboard and attaches her proposal, proffering it for his signature. 

The only outward sign of Brad's surprise is the minute tweak in his left eyebrow, which Lucretia hopes bodes well for her plan to hire a literal ten-year-old to work for her shadowy space cabal. Which sounds ridiculous the more she considers saying it out loud, but she's in for a penny, in for a pound.

"I'll make sure everything is in order from my end, ma'am," Brad says smoothly, without a hint of insurrection. Lucretia breathes a secret sigh of relief at not having to make her case. 

"Thank you, Brad, I'll send him to you for, what's the terrible jargon word," Lucretia snaps her fingers. "On-boarding. Ugh."

Brad laughs, genuinely. "Sure thing, ma'am. Anything else?"

"No, I think that'll be quite enough to keep you busy." She gestures, and Davenport sees him out, then shuts the door. 

"Davenport?"

Lucretia stands up from behind her desk and kneels beside Davenport. She takes his small hands in hers. "I'm going planetside, for Seeker business." 

Davenport looks aghast.

"Oh -- no -- shit -- no, not like that, I'm hiring this Angus kid. It shouldn't take more than a day. If you need anything, you know where to find Killian?"

"...Davenport," he grumbles.

"Really. I'll be back day after tomorrow," Lucretia says, and means it.

Davenport narrows his eyes. "Dav. En. Port," he says, enunciating each syllable clearly. He leaves in the direction of his quarters, silent. 

Lucretia stands with the scattershot pop-pop-pop of her stiff knees straightening, and grabs her traveling cloak on her way to the hangar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many, many thanks to @epersonae for her wonderful betaing, feedback, and encouragement. loves you~
> 
> come find me on tumblr at @emi--rose if you wanna talk about that Good Lucretia Content

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at emi--rose!


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